Opening Remarks:
Introduction to Hilary Rantisi’s Talk
Friday, 26 January 2007
Ladies & Gentlemen, welcome to this, the fifth talk in the second annual series of talks hosted by our Committee on Contemporary Spiritual-&-Public Concerns, the CSPC Committee. I’m Jerome Maryon, the President of the CSPC Committee, and I’ll serve as your moderator this evening.
Our topic is a daunting one: “Realities & Challenges Facing Christian & Muslim Palestinians.” Just how daunting is evidenced by the fact that two American Presidents have had a tough week on the topic. Former President Jimmy Carter, who recently published his 26th book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, has evoked a very rough reception from Jewish American readers, a reception exemplified by the difficult, on-again, off-again arrangements for his Brandeis talk, which was finally delivered at the University on Tuesday – and then followed immediately with a rebuttal by Alan Dershowitz. Also on Tuesday, of course, President George Bush gave his annual State of the Union Address, a 50-minute speech in which he devoted just one sentence, in the middle of one of his last paragraphs, to on-going efforts to bring peace to the Holy Land – a seemingly perfunctory sentence, for which he received no plaudits whatsoever.
So, we confront two questions tonight. First, the longer, darker question: Why is this topic so daunting? Second, the shorter, brighter question: What does our Speaker bring to the topic that may help us not only to understand it better, but also to find real grounds for hope?
First: Why is this topic so daunting? Perhaps the shortest response is this, that the conflict over possession of the Holy Land is a conflict that is at once historic, racial, geopolitical, and religious. As we all know, two of the world’s great religions, Judaism and Islām, have strong territorial ties to the region, and most especially to the capital city, Jerusalem, which our Jewish neighbors still call by its original name, Yerushalaim, and our Arab neighbors, al-Quds (the “Holy”). Of course, all of the events of the earthly life of Jesus Christ also occur in this very small area, so Christianity, although it is not wed to the land, is keenly attentive to what happens there. And where three great religions are involved, we can be sure that not only our highest aspirations but also our most desperate urges will emerge. In short, the religious dimension all too often serves to compound the racial conflict and to raise the geopolitical stakes.
Let’s briefly frame the historic conflict by four events, so that we have enough data to sense why this conflict is so daunting - and then we can move right on to our Speaker.
Our first event is more precisely the cumulative effect of two dates: just a generation after the Death and Resurrection of Our Lord (which occurred c. Anno Domini – the Year of Our Lord – 33), the Judean Zealots rose up in rebellion against the Roman Empire in A.D. 66-70; the failure of the Great Jewish Revolt resulted in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, esp. the Temple, and the beginning of the dispersal of the Jewish people. With the failure of Bar Kokhba’s Revolt in A.D. 135, the dispersal became a full-fledged Galut (“exile”), or what we call the Diaspora. The Jewish people were largely, though never entirely, driven out of the Holy Land, and thus they would pray, unceasingly, for the better part of two millennia, that they might return: “Next year in Jerusalem!”
Let’s fast-forward to our second event, occurring on the 2nd of November, 1917. The Zionist movement to gather the Jewish people back into Zion, i.e., Jerusalem and its historic dependencies, has been under way for a couple of decades; just now, it is the darkest hour of the First World War and the British Empire is engaged in a desperate global struggle against the German, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman Empires; what with Britain’s French ally weakening, its Russian ally falling out of the war, and its American ally not yet fully weighing in, London is desperate for all the help it can get. The Arabs are rallied against the Ottomans, but this is not enough; Britain needs funding, massive funding. Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary to His Majesty, King George V, and to Prime Minister David Lloyd George, issues the following fateful statement to Lord Rothschild on the 17th of November, the Balfour Declaration: “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…”
As we know, the Western Allies went on to win the First World War, and Britain received the “mandate” to rule Palestine. As we also know, relations between the Zionists who were returning to the Holy Land and the Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, who had been in possession of the farms and sleepy towns of the region - Palestine had been very much a political and economic backwater of the Ottoman Empire – quickly went from bad to worse. So, in the wake of the Second World War and the Holocaust (the “Shoah”) of six million Jews, Britain now decides to end the mandate and the United Nations issues a Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947. Hence our third event, again a pair of dates: on the evening of the 14th of May, 1948, Israel declares itself a state; the next morning, the 15th of May, five Arab armies attack Israel and the Jewish armies expel some 700,000 Palestinians. To the Arab Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, the 15th of May, 1948, will be known ever after as al-Nakba, the Catastrophe.
And so to our final event. In the midst of four major wars in the region, of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and of non-stop local fighting (esp. two campaigns of intifida or “shaking off,” i.e., uprising) in Palestine itself, it was agreed that the Palestine National Authority (PNA) would return to the West Bank and Gaza, and that it would begin the process of formal self-government, a process in preparation for an eventual peace agreement with Israel and full statehood for Palestine. In pursuit of this agreement, on the 25th of January of last year, the ruling Fatah party held elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), which is the legislature of the PNA. This legislature was expanded to 132 seats, the voting was conducted under proportional representation and a dual ballot (a much more complex system than we use in America) – and then the whole world was stunned by the results. Fatah received only 45 of the 132 seats in the PLC; the big winner was Hamas, with 74 seats – and the right to form a new government. Hence we now have the Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya, serving under the Fatah President, Mahmoud Abbas – and the occupation growing even more severe.
Thus our four events: the expulsion of the ancient Jews by the Roman Empire, the official welcome back of the modern Zionists by the British Empire, the birth of Israel and expulsion of most Palestinians, and the most recent formation of a Palestinian government, with more attendant estrangement between Israelis and Palestinians. All of these events were triggered by religious and/or racial aspirations; all were deeply misshapen by war; and all have consequently contributed to extraordinary misery.
But this week is not only the anniversary of the Hamas election last year. This Sunday is also the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, our Patron Saint, as it were, of the intersection of Faith-&-Reason – and, as our leading proponent of the dialogue of theology with philosophy, law, and politics, Thomas is also a patron of dialogue with both Arab and Jewish philosophers. Thus, Thomas implicitly instructs us, semper et ubique, to hear what the people in a conflict have to say for themselves, to accord them, not a throw-away line in a presidential speech, but a full and fair hearing.
Thus, in the spirit of Thomas, we shall now hear from the Harvard Director of the Middle East Initiative, next door, at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Born in al-Quds and raised in Ramallah, the provisional HQ of the Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza, Hilary Rantisi co-edited with Naim Ateek, the Anglican Liberation theologian in Jerusalem, a volume entitled, Our Story: The Palestinians (1999). She received a B.A. from Aurora University in Illinois and an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago.
Hilary’s talents are nothing if not multifaceted: she tackles the challenges in the Holy Land in four dimensions: the cross currents of religion and politics, to be sure, but also the dimensions of human rights and grassroots mobilization. Yesterday, another grassroots initiative, by the OneVoice Movement, lit up the World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland: a videocast from young Palestinian and Israeli peace activists moved an audience of some 2,000 governmental and business leaders from around the world. These activists, drawing on their deepest religious aspirations, helped set the stage for the announcement of a Palestinian-Israeli 500-kilometer (310-mile) “valley of peace” and common economic development. And next Friday, the new Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, will preside over a new meeting of the Quartet of Middle East negotiators. There could be movement now: despite the toll of some 60 years of suffering, even amidst these long years of near-despair, there is hope.
And to tell us what that near-despair has been like, to tell us what the effective conditions for peace-with-justice, the conditions of hope, really are, we have one of the most talented and articulate speakers on the topic: even more articulate than the one American President, and far, far more talented than the other – we have Hilary!