EPF/PIN talk, Chicago
Kathleen Christison
October 18, 2011
THE PROBLEM WITH ‘BALANCE’
Everyone in this room, I’m sure, has heard the injunction that those of us who speak for justice for the Palestinians must be “balanced.” Balanced, the great Middle East buzzword—usually meaning that, if we criticize Israel, we must also criticize the Palestinians equally. If we speak of injustice done to Palestinians by Israel, we must also recall the Holocaust, and injustices inflicted on Jews, and Jewish pain.
We might want to dismiss this demand with a shrug or a rolling of the eyes as something that’s unnecessary, even unfair. But unfortunately the demand that we be balanced is a reality that we will always be confronted with as we try to educate congregations about the situation in Palestine and raise awareness about Palestinian needs for justice and freedom from oppression.
It’s the kind of pushback that will always be shoved at us, and always with moral overtones: we are inevitably charged with anti-Semitism if we attempt to criticize Israel, if we simply lay out the facts of what Palestinians endure under Israeli occupation, and most certainly if we explain the Palestinian case without also giving the Israeli side. Nowadays, the charge that’s heard more often than anti-Semitism is “de-legitimization” of Israel. Today, it’s less a case of being perceived as personally hateful toward Jews, as with anti-Semitism, than of wanting to destroy the entire Jewish state of Israel.
This is the counter to almost any criticism of Israeli policies. These are heavy charges to deal with for anyone; being accused of the kind of ethnic and religious hatred that once led to the Holocaust is heavy. And these charges have caused many a stalwart crusader for Palestinians to back down. And caused many of the rest of us to walk on eggshells, pull our punches, and be less forthright and honest than we should be.
When I talk about the demand for “balance,” by the way, I’m not talking about the situation I described yesterday when my rector said she simply wished I had noted in my presentation of the Kairos Palestine document that there are many Israelis and American Jews also working for justice for Palestinians. This is OK. (I’m still frankly irritated by the need always to say something good about Israelis whenever one talks about Palestinian suffering, but I can accept this kind of demand for “balance” as fairly easy to accomplish and not dishonest.)
What I mean when I talk about the demand for balance that we so often face is the dishonest demand that we treat Israelis as suffering equally with Palestinians, or the notion that Palestinian terrorism is as destructive of true peace as are Israeli human rights violations, and Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians, and the Israeli occupation—when, for instance Israeli supporters demand ahead of an event that a conference have as many speakers who present the Israeli perspective as speakers who present the Palestinian perspective, or when after the fact Israeli supporters criticize a presentation or an article or book as unbalanced and one-sided because it did not devote an equal amount of time or space to Palestinian wrongdoing as to Israeli wrongdoing.
This is a very real, very serious problem that we confront. It is a profoundly moral issue, but I think we can take the moral high ground here. Israel and its supporters attempt to put the moral burden, the moral onus on us as Palestinians and Palestinian supporters—for simply being Palestinian or for speaking out for Palestinians, as if, as Edward Said once said, Palestinians have terrorism in their genes—and as if, I might add, Jews have innocence and virtue in their genes.
But in fact—and I believe this is the approach we should use when confronted with these demands for balance—in fact, the bottom line is that there is no equality whatsoever in the Israeli and the Palestinian situations, and there is no moral equivalence between an oppressor and an oppressed people. Moral equivalence, of course, is the argument Israeli supporters often throw up at the Palestinians: Israel is more virtuous, more innocent than the Palestinians, who are terrorists. We can turn this around, I think, and ask where is the moral equivalence between the occupied population and their oppressive occupier, between a people who were dispossessed and the dispossessors?
Desmond Tutu gets to the point most simply and directly: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice,” he has said, “you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
The Croatian-American theologian Miroslav Volf has said much the same thing. In his book Exclusion and Embrace—which, although it doesn’t address the Palestinian-Israeli situation, is about precisely hatred of the “other” and the exclusion of one people that we see in Palestine—he says that “neutrality is positively harmful.” For one thing, he says, a la Tutu, “it gives tacit support to the stronger party….Second, neutrality shields the perpetrators and frees their hands precisely by the failure to name them as perpetrators. Third, neutrality encourages the worst behavior of perpetrator and victim alike. If one party can get away with atrocities without offsetting neutrality, the other party, especially since it sees itself struggling for a just cause, will resort to atrocities too.”
He goes on, and I hope you’ll indulge me for a minute because this is so pertinent:
There is another sense in which no neutrality is possible. For those who appeal to the biblical traditions, the presumption that one perspective is as valid as the other until proven otherwise is unacceptable. The initial suspicion against the perspective of the powerful is necessary. Not because the powerless are innocent, but because the powerful have the means to impose their own perspective by argument and propaganda, and support the imposition both with the attractiveness of their ‘glory’ and with the might of their weaponry. In part, their power lies in the ability to produce and give plausibility to ideologies that justify their power….
Often, the only resource of the powerless is the power of their desperate cry. The Jewish prophets—and indeed the whole of the Scriptures—are biased toward the powerless. Such a preferential option for the powerless implies a privileged hearing for those whose voices are excluded....If justice is what we are after, then we will interrupt the powerful rhetoric of the smooth-tongued and strain our ear to hear the feeble and crackling voice of ‘those who cannot speak’ (Proverbs 31:8). The stammerings of the needy are an eloquent testimony to their violated rights; the spellbinding oratory of the powerful may well bespeak their bad conscience. It is above all the powerful who need to practice ‘double vision’ [that is, seeing the perspective of the “other”]—the groans of the powerless should disturb the serenity of their comforting ideologies.
I think we must keep these images of the powerful versus the powerless in mind when we advocate for justice for the Palestinians. It’s important, in the interests of true fairness, to make it clear that we don’t want injustice for Israelis or Jews and to make it clear also that many Israelis are working for true justice for the Palestinians. But, in speaking to congregations, we need to treat the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the situation of the Palestinians as every bit as much a moral as a political issue: the immorality of the injustice the Palestinians suffer because they have been dispossessed, displaced, denied their status as a nation state, and forced to live in exile or under foreign occupation.
Desmond Tutu has noted that during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa, there was never any question of whether “apartheid was evil or only a good policy that had gone awry in its application….[A]partheid,” he said, “was intrinsically in and of itself evil without remainder.” And this is the basis on which the truth was ferreted out in these hearings and reconciliation was achieved. It should be no different in Palestine-Israel: the Israeli system, and I’m talking about the system, not the Israeli people or Jews—the system, which by the testimony of numerous South Africans, white and black, resembles apartheid in most of its aspects, is “intrinsically in and of itself evil without remainder.” Kairos Palestine uses the word evil, and uses the word apartheid. We should too.
The difference with Palestine, of course, is that almost no one recognizes or will acknowledge this evil. But the message of South Africa is that the powerful, no matter how needy themselves, must not be able to gain redress at the expense of the powerless or to live in “the serenity of their comforting ideologies,” as Volf would have it, while the powerless are left simply to groan.
We have a difficult task. I’ll give you the example of the response I received to an article I wrote years ago, 2004, for the website Counterpunch. It was entitled “The Problem with Neutrality,” and in it I complained about the stated mission of many peace groups, including most of the supposedly progressive Jewish peace groups, which they define as finding what they call a “middle way” between Israel and the Palestinians. I pointed out that seldom, maybe never, in history have “decent people seriously accepted balance and neutrality as a proper response in moral conflicts or national conflicts that pit one very powerful party against a powerless party.” I drew an analogy between the Israeli occupation and slavery in the US in the 19th century. Imagine that a group of well-meaning activists hope to end slavery without war. They propose that the two sides strive for reconciliation, that slaves sit down at the negotiating table with slave owners and attempt—without any outside help—to work out their differences through negotiation. These activists believe that slavery is oppressive but that the property rights of slave owners and their right to a livelihood must also be respected, that they have a right to exist and not be murdered in a slave uprising. They propose a middle way between the two sides, in the belief that both are responsible for the conflict (because slaves have shown a propensity to rebel, causing the slave owners to tighten their oppressive grip), and they believe the only way to achieve peace is to avoid blaming either side.
This is of course absurd. I also noted that in other colonial conflicts in the 20th century—in Vietnam, Algeria, South Africa, elsewhere in Africa and Asia, all conflicts that by their very nature involved an overwhelmingly strong power in absolute domination over a virtually powerless civilian population—no one, no mediator, no commentator, no activist group ever credibly proposed that the conflict be resolved by working from a neutral position to try “reconciling” the two sides. The reason I bring all this up is to describe the response I received from a spokesman for the Jewish organization Tikkun, Rabbi Michael Lerner’s group. What this person termed the “most significant” objection to the article was that I had not taken account of the fact that none of the groups I was analogizing—slave owners, white South Africans, etc.—had a “collective history of persecution and trauma similar in its breadth, depth, or recency to the traumas inherent in Jewish history.” She did say that this did not excuse Israel’s behavior, but she believed that “the particular psychological backdrop of this conflict needs to be attended to skillfully for lasting change to occur.” In other words—my interpretation—it’s not quite so bad when Israelis are oppressive because Jews have a history of suffering.
This is the kind of pushback we will get when we try to press the case for justice in Palestine. And I haven’t even touched on the position of Christian churches, which, acting out of guilt over the Holocaust and over centuries of exclusion of Jews, have come around full circle to reaffirm unquestioningly the election, the chosenness, of Jews and everything about Israel.
It’s an indication, in fact, both of how pervasive is the impulse to protect Israel from criticism and of how Christian churches refuse in their guilt over the Holocaust to look at what Israel has done to the Palestinians that Miroslav Volf, in a book specifically dealing with the theology and the realities of exclusion of the “other” by a people considering itself superior, fails ever to mention Israel and its policy of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Let me just finish now by noting what Desmond Tutu took from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings that he led: that there can be “no future without forgiveness.” This is quite profound, but I think it’s necessary also to say—as he makes clear in his beautiful book of this title—that there can be no forgiveness or reconciliation without truth, without redress. The victims of apartheid and the victims of those who fought apartheid with violence did not forgive except when their victimizers spoke the truth, made restitution, acknowledged and showed remorse for their injustices. It must be the same in Palestine. Kairos Palestine itself speaks of reconciliation “once justice has been restored” (3.3.3)—that is, reconciliation after justice.
My wife and I visited Israel on a pilgrimage in July 2011 as members of a group from our parish church, St. Michael & All Angels, Corona del Mar, CA, in the Diocese of Los Angeles.
We became aware, almost from the beginning of that two week visit, of the powerful position held by Israel and the powerless position forced upon the Palestinians, as clearly described in this article.
To date there is no force arrayed against the Israeli position, other than moral, that has any possibility of countering that overpowering position to achieve justice.
We must all work to bring Israel to account for its actions and to achieve justice for the Palestinians.