In November 2011 a group of ten women bishops of the United Methodist Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Episcopal Church traveled* for nine days to Palestine/Israel.  One of the several African American bishops, after seeing and experiencing the situation in the West Bank, said, “We remember this!”  What this bishop apparently newly realized is how similar the struggle for dignity, justice and freedom is between the Palestinians and the African American history in the United States.  The dispossessions, the humiliations, the suppression, the harassment, the discrimination imposed by the dominant Israeli government is of one piece with the African American experience in the Jim Crow South and elsewhere in this country.  An Israeli government, made up of people so beleaguered themselves historically, with such a biblical mandate for  seeking justice and peace, now so fearful for their own security, now practicing apartheid-like measures, forsaking their own moral high ground, is seemingly unable to entertain thoughts and dreams of two peoples—one a people with no land and the other a landed people—coexisting, living in harmony in one land.

I was asked recently why I engage myself in this far off, seemingly insoluble dilemma.  There are several answers:

1. Every year I renew on four different occasions my Baptismal Covenant in which I pledge once more, among other pledges, to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”  I do so because I seek to be a faithful Christian.
2. I have been a pastor for fifty years, forty-six of them in inner city African American parishes, in New York City, Boston, and Baltimore.  I now serve a predominantly African American congregation in smaller Oxford, North Carolina.  For the first fifteen years of that ministry I sought primarily to “pick up the pieces,” to try to meet critical needs.  For the remaining thirty-five years I moved more into seeking justice, with church-based organizing as the vehicle.  The situations I experienced over these fifty years are deeply related to the situation I discovered in two trips to Palestine/Israel, in l987 and 2010.  The struggle for justice and a common humanity in these places is remarkably similar to that among the Palestinians, in my opinion.
3. I am aware of some of the possibilities of a better way.  Who of us has not been astounded by the recent history of South Africa?  A dominant, minority people, always fearful for their own security, foisting upon the majority people a brutal regime of oppression and apartheid, never daring to posit a land in which all of its peoples could live together in peace, now one nation, although far from perfect, with a local black leader, called “The Father of the Country.”

Who is to say this cannot happen also in Palestine/Israel?  It IS happening in South Africa!  It IS possible!  It CAN happen!  “By a large majority both peoples (the Palestinians and the Israelis) want a peaceful solution and are willing to make big compromises to get it,” writes Sari Nusseibeh, in ONCE UPON A COUNTRY.  Let a new Mandela arise in Palestine!  Let a new Mandela arise in Israel!

Can they dream it?  Can WE dream it?

~~ John Heinemeier serves as Vicar of St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church, Oxford NC, in the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina.

*Learn more about the trip http://www.cmep.org/content/women-voices-hope-message-bethlehem