LET THERE BE PEACE
Ainka Jackson, 2019
I recently was blessed to travel to Israel and Palestine with Amplify Peace (who amplifies the voice of women peacemakers) and the Telos Group (who is Pro-Israel, Pro-Palestine, Pro-Peace). Before studying to go on the trip, I thought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was centuries old going back to the conflict between Abraham, Sarah and Hagar and their children, Isaac and Ishmael. I was wrong. I didn’t know that for centuries Jewish, Muslim and Christian people lived in peace in the Holy Land. I didn’t know the roots of the conflict go back to the atrocities faced by the Jewish people during the Holocaust and their understandable need to have their own land so nothing like that would ever happen to them again.
I thought this was a battle between religions—Judaism and Islam. I was wrong. They lived in peace until after the Holocaust. I never knew there were Palestinian Christians. I thought Israelis were Jewish and Palestinians were Muslim and it’s so much more complicated than that. Vera, a Palestinian Christian who is the former Mayor of Bethlehem told us, “When you lose hope, you hate yourself. Hate one day will return. It will kill you.”
I thought that Israeli Jews would all be considered equal. According to many, my thought was wrong. We were told by several people that Jews from Eastern Europe were favored and had more political control than Jews from the Middle East and Africa, even though they make up 50% of the population.
I always associated Arab with Muslim. I was wrong. I didn’t fully understand that Arab was a culture, so therefore there are Arab Christians.
I thought that Christians could be key to solving the conflict until I visited the site of Jesus' Crucifixion and burial, which is now the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I was wrong. Not because Christians won’t but because we got to get our own stuff together. The church building was constructed over Jesus’s burial cave, but I felt no resurrection power. I saw a lot of people pushing and pulling, standing in lines for hours, desperate to touch the place of the resurrection so they could presumably have that power. The “church” building is divided up into so many areas because the different denominations responsible for its upkeep cannot agree on how to take care of it. Literally columns have been divided into two because the denominations cannot agree on how to take care of the space. I was devastated.
Our Jewish guide shows us the map of the divisions of the building where Jesus was buried.
I went over to the Holy Land, which at times felt more like a hated land, believing what Jesus says in John 14:12, “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” So, to see people who profess to believe in resurrection power and the same Holy Spirit, not being able to work through the upkeep of a building, deeply saddened me. That sadness turned to judgment and then to fear. Fear that if they can’t get it “right” then how can we in Selma, including most of our leaders who profess the same things, get it “right.” That fear turned into anger and that anger turned in to self-righteousness, which blinds you and is different from the righteous anger that God feels. But then I was convicted.
All throughout this blog I say what I thought and how wrong I had been. It was all about me, which is the root of most conflict because it causes us to fear. Jews fear another holocaust and Palestinians fear their land and rights being taken. Each side fears retaliation and the circle of what fear produces continues. A former Israeli soldier told us, “When I’m working from a traumatic point of view I’m coming from a place of fear. The more and more I come back to myself, back to my body, I’m less right wing. Sometimes the truth is too painful. We need to reflect with each other, Palestinians and Jews. See each other’s humanity but you don’t have time to share who you are as a soldier. You need to move to stop the pain. I was in a circle of terror all the time.” So many people, whether Israeli or Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim or Christian, told us that relationships broaden our knowledge of each other and combat fear.
One person shared, “fear creates hatred and that hatred creates violence.” One Palestinian Muslim who lost at least one brother to this conflict and leads an organization with Israeli and Palestinian women said, “We must decide we want to love not to leave [die].” Another mother shared that her baby died as she couldn’t get to a hospital for several hours due to the restrictions put upon Palestinians, walls that separate Palestinians and Israelis, and checkpoints that hinder free movements for many Palestinians. She is a part of the same organization and said, “Losing one is more than enough for me. Stopping the conflict stops the risk of me losing more children fighting. I didn’t want them [my family] to know [what happened] so they wouldn’t revenge and die.” She continued by saying, “They [Israelis] are human like us. They share the same tests [trials].” An Israeli mother who lost her son in the conflict, who was an Israeli soldier, and co-leads the same organization said, “One of the worst things I’ve done is to prejudge. It’s easy to judge if you’re kids are not standing at the checkpoint either in uniform or not.” When speaking about some people’s justification of the ongoing conflict, she went on to say, “You may not kill anyone in the name of my child.” When explaining how people cannot assume what kind of person her son was as Israelis have mandatory service in the military at the age of 18, she continued, “You don’t know what kind of soldier is behind the gun.” She ended by saying that building relationships is the basis for any Truth and Reconciliation process that would be a part of the future peace process. “I gave up being a victim and realized that what I did had nothing to do with what the person who killed my son did. That made me free.”
I was convicted again. Convicted from all of the judgment and self-righteousness that I felt before and during the trip. Convicted of how little I knew and know. Convicted about the arrogance I had thinking I knew what the problem was and what was best. Convicted about taking matters into my own hands as if it was my job to teach instead of prayerfully discerning what I should and should not do.
When I came home, I still thought that fear was the root of the conflict in the Middle East. Then God brought back to my remembrance the scripture found in 1 John 4:18, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” Love is the key. It is the key to the conflict in the Middle East and the conflicts in our homes, on our jobs, in our government (local, state and national). Love is the key. Love is not anemic or weak but has the power to transform ourselves and those who appear to be our enemies. The God of love is also the God of peace (2 Corinthians 13:11). Love is an action word. That same scripture tells us to “Strive for full restoration, encourage one another, be of one mind, live in peace.” 2 Timothy 2:22 tells us to “pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace.”
So ultimately what did I learn from my pilgrimage to the Holy Land? What did I learn about love and peace? I learned that I am the problem. The same lack of humility, fear, judgment and self-righteousness that I sometimes have would produce the same conflict happening in the Middle East or East Selma if I was put in another context, another situation, or encountered different painful experiences and trauma.
1. I must become and remain humble. 2 Chronicles 7:14 says, “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” The Holy Land or the Selma land can’t heal without humility. Humility for me means that I must continually seek and obey God even when faced with injustice, unfairness, and oppression. It means that I must love even my enemies.
2. I must continually become more knowledgeable. “My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge.” Hosea 4:6. Exposure to other beliefs and cultures helps me to better understand myself as well as to see the humanity in others. I must learn by reading, watching documentaries and being in relationship with and listening to people who seem and may be different from me.
3. Don’t let fear drive me. Let love do that. 1 John 4:18. My experiences or my pain cannot dictate my actions. Only love should do that.
4. Finally, I learned that there can be no world peace if I do not possess and show peace to others. Galatians 5:22 tells me that the fruit of the Spirit is love and peace. We heard the word Shalom a lot while in the Holy Land, particularly while experiencing a beautiful Shabbat meal with a Jewish family one Friday evening, the day which begins their Sabbath observance. Shalom means peace in Hebrew. We also heard the word Salaam several times as well, which is peace in Arabic. I could say that peace is talked a lot about in the Holy Land, but are people really living it? Well that’s not for me to judge but what is for me to focus on is am I living it? Am I whole? Am I one with God and all of God’s creation? Do I have peace with self, others and God? Another person on the trip said, “Peacemakers make invisible violence visible. They disrupt systemic violence without replicating it.” When I’ve been unhumble, judgmental, fearful and self-righteous, I have replicated violence and have not been a peacemaker. (I guess it was about me after all )