Of Occupation and Occupiers

Omar Barghouti

A couple of months back, at a seminar with indigenous leaders, I was reminded anew of my privilege: the wealth, education, confidence I enjoy because my forebearers settled a continent that did not belong to them and built prosperous lives on the backs of great peoples they considered less than human.  In the eyes of these indigenous friends, I am a settler of sorts, born of settlers, descended from other settlers.  My power is derived from that long historical lineage of privilege and plunder.  There's no way around it.  

Now I consider myself fairly self-aware.  And for a long time my discipleship has involved an honest reckoning with race, class and privilege.  But hearing this from indigenous folk--and indigenous Christian folk at that--stung sharply.  They weren't harsh about it; and they desperately want to forge deep, consequential alliances with settlers like me.  But they were pretty clear.  I live and work and pass life along to my children in that matrix: the matrix of settler-colonialism.  Most of our churches and radical Christian communities do the same.

Their pointed reminder (that I too am a settler) landed like a gut punch and caused me to (all over again) rethink my commitments to racial justice, economic jubilee and liberation.  What might it mean for me--and others like me in the discipleship movement--to be faithful allies among those who bear the weight of occupation and injustice and racism and nationalism?  Where does this path lead?

My friend and mentor Ched Myers turns to Mark 10 as a way of getting at all this.  There, Jesus turns away James and John, who look to leverage their faith for power and privilege in the kingdom.  He reminds them (and us) that his way is a way of sacrifice, humility, service to the project of liberation and community.  "Pay closer attention," he says to James and John, "to who I am and what I'm doing among you."

Then, just verses later, as Jesus is leaving Jericho for Jerusalem, the blind Bartimaeus cries out from the roadside: "Have mercy!  Have mercy!"  Here's the moment, Ched says, we need to pray on.  Bartimaeus--like the disciples, really--is blind: that is, he's disoriented and bewildered, mystified perhaps by his own privilege (or suffering).  And he seems to know this: he cries out through the crowd of disciples and hangers-on.  And this, THIS, Jesus seems to say, I can work with!  Now we've got some traction.

So he stops, stands still in the chaos, and calls for Bartimaeus to come.  The disciples (dim to be sure) see no point.  But Jesus insists.  When Bartimaeus does come, he says to Jesus: "Let me see again.  That's all.  Just teach me to see again."  His vision is indeed restored, and Bartimaeus follows Jesus "on the way."  In other words, his vision allows him to stay with Jesus, to learn from Jesus, to join Jesus' caravan of hope on the path to Jerusalem.  On the way to sacrifice, humility and liberation.  It's his awareness, it's his confession, it's his broken heart that allows Bartimaeus to follow Jesus and learn the things that make for peace (and agitation and resistance and redemption).

And I think my indigenous colleagues are asking for this as well.  Asking for awareness. Inviting confession.  Urging settler-colonialists like me to listen closely and deal honestly with the legacies of privilege and plunder that are our history.  This is where discipleship gets real.  This is how we find the road to Jerusalem, to Calvary, beyond.  And not to do so is to be complicit (see James and John) in the ongoing story of occupation, colonialism and impoverishment that is woven into the American experience.

"Matoaka" -- Icon by The Rev. Robert W. Two Bulls (rtwobulls@hotmail.com)

Three years ago, I met Omar Barghouti virtually--when he spoke by link to a conference we hosted in Santa Cruz.  Omar's participation was deeply disturbing to some and highly controversial in our community.  As co-founder of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement in Palestine/Israel, he's a lightning rod for many who see the movement itself as a threat to Israel, an anti-Semitic project or both.

Two summers ago, my daughter and I met Omar for coffee in Ramallah.  He's a very busy man, but he took time out to sit with us for a long while.  We talked about his children in the States and his hopes for the movement.  And he was animated in his appreciation for our 2016 conference and the Hewlett Packard boycott we signed onto months before.  He was generous, disciplined, kind and far from the monster some have made out him to be.

But there's no doubt that the organized movement to protest Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine (and their seige on Gaza) is perceived as a threat.  Just as Ilhan Omar is targeted by defenders of that occupation, so too is Omar Barghouti and others like him.  When he tried to travel to the US recently--for a long speaking tour AND his daughter's wedding--he was denied entry and denied voice in a conversation critically important to all of us.  (And how does that work?  Is there any American justification, whatsover, for silencing a human rights defender?  Does that push democracy forward at all?)

So what's the link?  Between occupations, there and here?  Between Robert Two Bulls in Minnesota and Omar Barghouti in Ramallah?  And how does it land in my life?

As a privileged person, as an American settler, I can opt out of all this.  I can leave the conflict in Palestine to Omar and others.  I can turn my back on his BDS movement (too controversial!) and spend my time doing other things.  In the same way, I can tuck away my conversations with indigenous colleagues and their urgent invitation to confession and solidarity.  I have that freedom.  I can always opt out.

Omar Barghouti cannot.  Issa Amro--in Hebron--cannot.  Tarek Alzoughbi and Usama Nicola and Zoughbi Zoughbi--in Bethlehem--cannot.  Their schools are being shut down more and more regularly.  Their East Jerusalem neighborhoods are being plundered every week.  The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a conflict of religions; nor is it a great tragedy thousands of years in the making, inevitable and tragic.  It is about power and land, and the systematic theft of land and culture (and life itself) from the Palestinian people.  That story urgently needs to be told.

What they ask of us--of you, of me, of the West--is that we listen.  At least.  Omar Barghouti has a story to tell and a perspective to share.  And it's urgent.

From Michelle Goldberg's piece in the New York TImes:

What are pro-Israel forces afraid of?  The B.D.S. movement doesn't engage in or promote violence.  Its leaders make an effort to separate anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism; the Palestinian B.D.S. National Committee recently demanded that a Moroccan group stop using the term B.D.S. in its name because it featured anti-Semitic cartoons on its Facebook page.

Barghouti couches his opposition to Zionism in the language of humanist universalism.  The official position of the B.D.S. movement, he says, is that "any supremacist, exclusionary state in historic Palestine--be it a 'Jewish state,' an 'Islamic state,' or a 'Christian state'--would by definition conflict with international law and basic human rights principles."

The movement is agnostic on a final dispensation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  But it calls for the right of Palestinian refugees--both those displaced by the creation of Israel and their descendents--to return to their familial homes, which would likely end Israel's Jewish majority.  Barghouti told me he personally believes in the creation of a single state in whicih Israeli Jews, as individuals, would have civil rights, but Jews as a people would not have national rights.

All of this raises questions.  And all of this stirs emotions and fears.  But now more than ever, it's critically important that we entertain honest voices around honest issues: What do human rights mean in the Holy Land?  Is the world community prepared to watch as Israel annexes the West Bank?  What would a single democratic nation--with a constitution, and civil and human rights protected for all--look like?  

This Holy Week, I'm trying not to 'opt out.'  I'm trying to hang in there: with Palestinian activists and Jewish Voice for Peace friends; with indigenous colleagues and Black Lives Matter leaders.  I'm trying hard to hang in there with Jesus, too.  Because his way promises light in the darkness, and hope in the storm, and new life for those committed to humankind's shared destiny.