...but they should defend justice.

The political shake-up in the Middle East is going to have serious repercussions across the West too. A democratic system does not prevent those with extremist views coming to power by the will of the people, and there are many in the US and Israel who are concerned that releasing Mubarak’s stranglehold in Egypt will result in a more aggressive stance towards Israel and the rise of extremist elements in its politcs.

This could be awkward, but is the hard end of the democratic system: the people choose, and what the people choose you have to go with. End of.

However, in the case of the more aggressive stance towards Israel, it’s clear that this is an equal and opposite reaction to the almost unquestionably pro-Zionist stance of the US. The Arab countries may appear extreme in their political aggression towards Israel, but this is exactly matched by the extreme political aggression the US has traditionally shown in support of Israel.

Much of this support has come via the Christian right working in coalition with the Zionist lobby, and what concerns me is that many who may be moving towards a more ‘emerging’ view of faith are not really thinking through the implications of that politically. In other words, if you are beginning to call into question your inherited ecclesioloy, you are also going to have to call into question your inherited political theology.

What I love about what Brian McLaren is doing is that he has refused to shy away from this. He’s been to the region, seen with his own eyes, and responded in his writing and speaking. Shane Claiborne has done the same, as has Jonny Baker.

Sadly, many have not followed. They want a theology of ecclesiastic liberation, without a politics of a just peace, and I’m afraid that the two simply don’t match up.

Although he is a self-confessed ‘conservative republican’, a conversation I had on Facebook with someone recently outlined one of the key problems. A plea to pray for peace in Jerusalem – a worthy prayer, of course – was followed by a quotation from Genesis:

“I wil bless those who bless you, I will curse those who treat you with contempt, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

This was followed by the comment, ‘this is not an interpretation; this is just a quotation from Scripture.’

The problem is, by framing this verse in the context of prayer for peace in Jerusalem – alongside a video link to the Israeli national anthem – it has been conscripted to speak on behalf of modern Israel. Which then begs the point: does it mean that Palestinians should be cursed? If so, then the many many Palestinian Christians I know living in Bethlehem or Beit Sahour are being told they are cursed by fellow Christians in the West.

The verse is God addressing Abraham – and again here is a problem. Are the Old Testament passages that refer to Israel to be read as refering to the modern nation state of Israel too? If they are, then Israel is effectively a Jewish state. And this is inherently racist as defined by the UN: its laws are biased towards people of one particular faith.

The problem here is that this is precisely what is going on in Israel: the law works in favour of those who are Jewish, and against those who are still Israeli citizens, but of Arab descent.

The theological positions we hold have political implications, and if these are unbalanced and unjust then we can only expect an equal and opposite position to be held by those on the other side. ‘Praying for peace in Jerusalem’ has to mean justice and peace for all on all sides, and retaining a strongly pro-Israel stance – at the expense of justice for Palestinians – is actually fuelling extremism.

Please, don’t inherit poor theo-political positions. See for yourself – go to the region if you can and meet people from all sides. I’m pretty sure that’s what a guy from Bethlehem would have done a while back.

I made some notes for a talk I gave to them which I thought I’d upload here. Please – these are skeletal notes, so forgive the typos etc – it’s not verbatim stuff, and not exactly what I said last night. But it does outlines some ideas about how the ideas of TAZ and empathy for the other might work in situations of conflict – which seems very current with the political situation in the US, and the ongoing problems in Israel/Palestine etc… Plus the day to day stuff we all live through too. Hope there’s some useful stuff here – do shout if you need clarification on anything.

[ Thoughts on Peace ]

In the previous two posts { [ 1 ] [ 2 ] } I’ve been wondering whether a certain symmetry of relationship is needed if empathy is going to flow between two people. The springboard for this was Zizek critiquing the adage ‘an enemy is a friend whose story I have not yet heard’ by applying it to Hitler. Surely, he argues, even after hearing Hitler’s story we could not be friends?

My argument has been that this is precisely true – not that the adage is wrong, but because Hitler was a sociopath who, because of his inability to empathise with the other, could not know true friendship, where one’s life is reachable by an-other. I then extended this to argue that situations where there are major power imbalances also prevent true friendship too, and wondered what this meant theologically: is it even possible to call God friend, especially with ‘His’ sociopathic tendencies we see in the Old Testament.

I think it’s worth extending these thoughts in one final direction, prompted by Clare’s comment in the last post about corporations. I’ve not seen ‘The Corporation’ but I recognise the description of organisations that display sociopathic characteristics: no empathy, no ability to change, no sense of responsibility to their environment. Indeed, it seems that the church is one of the worst examples of such a sociopathic organisation. It’s ideals are sky high, yet scandal upon scandal emerges about sexual abuse, poor treatment of women and minorities, and a pathological inability to respond to local situations or be ‘reachable.’

I think this touches on a previous series of posts I did on self-organizing leadership, in which I used some work done by Douglas Griffin about our views of corp-orations and organ-izations. These words are just metaphors for embodiment – and they leave it too easy for us to ignore the fact that we are meant to just see them ‘as if’ they were bodies – not to actually think that they are:

“This designation of a ‘body’ to a group of people is purely hypothetical, ‘as if’. Forgetting this ‘as if’ and attributing direct agency to these groups has become a habit of thought leading us to think and talk about groups as objects, as things…”

He goes on:

“we locate ethical responsibility in both the ’system’, simply taking it for granted that a ’system’ can be ethically responsible, and in a few individuals. In doing this we adopt a particular view of leadership in which it is individual leaders who are blamed and punished when things go wrong, or praised when they go right. The rest of us are allocated to passive roles as victims of the system and of manipulative leaders, and our salvation lies in the actions of heroic leaders. In thinking in this way, we are obscuring how we are all together involved…”

I think this should help us to get round some of the problems of corporations like the church being perceived as sociopathic. This only happens when those involved in them become passive, and allow relationships to get asymmetrical. This then prevents empathy flows, and thus the ability of the body to respond appropriately.

In other words, if we are to befriend our enemies, if we are stop them becoming sociopathic, then we need to adjust the power relationships, if that is possible. For some, like Hitler, they well remain unreachable. For others, like the Israeli soldier, the institution they are involved in (the Israeli state) may be so powerful that symmetry may be impossible. For yet others, like the church, we may need to do some rethinking of our view of the corporation, and those who lead it, in order for symmetry to be achieved. In particular, it will only be if the church takes the same attitude as that of Christ, as Paul puts it in the beginning of Philippians, and discard power that any empathy flow will be possible.

And it’s to that church-stripped-of-divine-power that I’m hoping to look at next, in some thoughts on Zizek’s ‘Marxianity’

I’m currently enjoying one of Zizek’s new books, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – an allusion to Marx’s introduction to his Eighteenth Brumaire in which he wrote:

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

This, then, is Zizek’s dissection of the global financial crisis, undertaken with his usual array of linguistic and philosophical scalpels.

Reaction to the banking crisis, as Zizek outlines, was often typified by the Pope’s injunction to fight against the culture of excessive greed and consumption. Zizek sees a big problem in this: by ‘fighting against the culture of excessive greed’ we are inscribing greed and over-consumption as personal sin and private psychological propensity:

“The self-propelling circulation of Capital thus remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled, since it controls our activity.”

Extending this view, Zizek then critiques the idea that ‘the proper way to fight the demonization of the Other is to subjectivize him, to listen to his story.’ In other words, the adage that ‘an enemy is someone whose story you have not yet heard’ is wrong. Supporting this, he asks us:

“Is one then also ready to affirm that Hitler was an enemy only because his story had not been heard? Do the details of his personal life redeem the horrors that resulted from his reign?”

I think there is an problem with his argument here – a failure to understand that the empathetic relationship within the idea of friendship has to work both ways. Of course, one could not consider Hitler a ‘friend’ if he continued to act in the ways that he did. But in true friendship we changed, and perhaps if we had befriended him as a younger man, we might have been able to draw him away from the path that he eventually took. To assume otherwise is to isolate him, to fetishize him, to deny him any ability to change. Now, it may be that he was truly psychopathic and therefore totally unable to do so, in which case no friendship would even be possible.

Zizek then brings in another example, of an Israeli soldier who, on finding out that the Palestinian family whose house he was overseeing demolition of had a child with the same name as him, took his wallet out and showed them photos – but still went ahead with his duties. Again, Zizek is critical of the ‘befriending an enemy’ position, but again the point is that the power-relationship between soldier and oppressed family meant that no friendship was possible, and thus no symbiotic empathetic flow either.

So is my enemy simply someone whose story I have not yet heard? Perhaps, but only if that enemy, that ‘other’ is someone with whom friendship is actually possible – someone who has the psychological capacity for reciprocal relationship, and someone with whom there is some level of power equality.

What this might mean theologically is something that I might look at in another post…

Born into occupation.
Killed by a corrupt state.

Growing in poverty
Troubling to the rich

Teller of wise tales
Lover of good meals

Accused of insurrection
Disregarded by the courts

Awkward for the powerful
Bain of the religious

Beaten by soliders
Denied justice
Tortured
Forsaken
Left for dead
But never to be underestimated:

Jewish, not Israeli
Jesus was a Palestinian.

Tomorrow (10th) is ‘International Human Rights Day,’ commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN. Article 1 famously reads:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Incarnation is about embodiment in a particular place and time, and at this time of advent we reflect on God’s decision to be embodied in a particular place at a particular time – what is now Israel/Palestine.

His position in society would certainly have been lacking some basic rights. He was not a Roman citizen. They were the occupying power and could make unreasonable demands of Jews, and treat them cruelly. Movements could be restricted. Jesus, as a poor Jew from a northern village was certainly not ‘free and equal in dignity.’

His birth place is in what is now a Palestinian territory. Surrounded by a huge concrete wall and guarded with armoured road blocks, it is under occupation by the Israeli government. The following is taken from an email I received today from the Arab Association for Human Rights:

61 years after the adoption of the UDHR, Israel continues to pursue clearly discriminatory policies and practices and the violation of Palestinians’ human rights have persisted, and escalated.

This year began with Israel’s devastating 23-day offensive on the Gaza Strip, (‘Operation Cast Lead’). This military offensive resulted in the killing of over 1,400 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom were civilian, and the devastation of the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure. To date, Gaza continues to suffer a humanitarian crisis due to Israel’s unrelenting illegal blockade, which has, inter alia, rendered reconstruction – and thus recovery – impossible.

Over the course of 2009 existing illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land have expanded and new settlements have been established. The confiscation and annexation of Palestinian land has continued unabated, and intensified in East Jerusalem. In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that the Annexation Wall is a violation of Israel’s obligations under international law. However, construction continues.

The systematic violation of Palestinians’ human rights cannot be allowed to continue any longer. As the international community celebrates International Human Rights Day, we as Palestinian non-governmental organisations, remind the Member States of the United Nations to uphold their pledge “to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms”, as enshrined in the UDHR.

So as we head into International Human Rights day, let’s think on the land where Jesus was born – bound and undignified – and act to lobby hard for peace in the region.

Surely this is the sort of thing that Israel ought to be celebrating: a peaceful literary event, supported by UNESCO.

Instead, they send in a squad of 12 armed police, while their politicians ignore international law and even pressure from to US, and announce they’ll keep expanding settlements. I just wonder sometimes, do you even want peace?

Following a recent visit to Israel and Palestine to meet peacemakers from all sides and faiths, I was struck by just how important Europe is to the situation. Yes, the US has a major role in brokering peace, especially given their high levels of support of all kinds for Israel, and yes the other Middle Eastern countries have a huge role in creating the atmosphere within which peace can flourish.

But the European Union is the destination for 80% of Israel’s exports. It therefore has huge leverage in terms of the trade agreements it has with Israel. These are currently under renegotiation, and there is a strong campaign to lobby the EU Parliament to make preferential trade agreements with Israel contingent on them abiding by UN resolutions regarding settlement activity, the ‘security wall’, land confiscation and collective punishment.

With elections for the European Parliament coming up in a few weeks, it is important that we know where our candidates stand on the issue, and so this questionnaire has been produced for people to send round to the candidates in their area.

You can find the list of registered candidates in your area here. If want an easy way to contact all of your representatives in local, national and European parliaments, writetothem.com is fantastic – just type in your postcode, select whose chain you want to rattle, and type away.