Bishop Younan in Loviisa Church, Finland, 8th August 2010. Picture: Timo Virtala

Living as the Children of Light

Dear sisters and brothers in Christ:

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you always.

It is a great privilege and honor for me to worship with you this morning.

I carry greetings to you from my church, the ELCJHL. We continue to be living witnesses in education, spiritual work, diakonia, ecumenism and interfaith dialogue. We as Christians and especially as Lutherans have a role to play in the Middle East in reconciliation and interfaith dialogue. Although small in number, we continue to preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments, advancing God’s kingdom for Christians and non- Christians alike. We are encouraged by our Lutheran communion to continue our creative mission and prophetic diakonia. Please pray that Palestinian Christians may not lose faith and leave the country. For who wants to imagine the Holy Land where Christ walked without Christians?

Last month, Lutherans from all over the world gathered in Stuttgart for the Lutheran World Federation Eleventh Assembly. The theme of the assembly was, “Give us today our daily bread” (Matthew 8:8). This theme may seem simplistic, but as Martin Luther wrote in his Small Catechism, daily bread includes everything needed for this life. The message from the assembly puts it like this:

The sacramental sharing of bread and wine obliges us to care for the daily bread of our societies (1 Corinthians 11:17-34). As a communion of small and large churches, we recognize that we fulfill the obligation of feeding the world physically and spiritually in various ways, for instance through preaching the gospel, education and capacity building, social and political diakonia, advocacy and effective communication.

When we recognize that our prayer for daily bread means bringing justice in order that others can pray for their daily bread, we are embodying what St. Paul says in Ephesians 5:8: “Live as children of light.”

What was in the mind of St. Paul when he admonished the Ephesians to “live as children of light”? As you know, the early church expected the second coming of Jesus to come quickly. St. Paul observes that his coming did not take place as people expected. His letter is to a congregation that was trying to mold its identity, to disengage itself from the past in order to live as Christians. Paul’s as well as John’s writing contain clear contrasts between the darkness of pagan life and light-filled life of Christians.

St. Paul’s words here are reminiscent of Jesus Christ’s, when he said, “The light is with you for a little longer … believe in the light, so that you may become children of light” (John 12:35-36). This means a Christian is in communion with Christ, who is the light of the Christian. Through baptism the children of light become “participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).

This is why our Lord and Savior admonishes his followers, “You are the light of the world. … let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:14, 16) and St. Paul exhorts, “Live as children of light” (Ephesians 5:8).

It is the same challenge we face in our day. How can we live in this world and carry the light of Christ in us? This is the exact challenge that all churches and all Christians face daily. It is easy to intend to live in the light. But once we are confronted with a problem, are challenged by society or are tempted to enact revenge, we see that this noble teaching remains a far-fetched goal. Even so, with all our weaknesses, we are to live as children of light. Paul gives us a set of instructions: “The fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:9-10).

Some may tell me that Christians have gone through many events that have led us to be different from the believers in Ephesus in the time of Paul. It is true that movements like Reformation, Enlightenment, modernity and post-modernity have affected and shaped our Christian identity. But through all those movements and trends, the core question remained: How can we who are baptized in Christ live as children of light?

In these post-modern times, it is easy to label people as conservatives, liberals, ultraliberals, etc. Even Christians are categorized. I don’t pay much attention to all these labels, because what I care about is if we Christian live as children of light.

In days gone by, bolts of cloth were stacked in dark rooms. The merchant would pull out a bolt and hold it up to the light so the buyer could inspect the weave and check for blemishes.

In the same way, we Christians should stand in the light of Christ, so that we may see our flaws – our weaknesses, narrow-mindedness, judgmental attitudes and hypocrisy – so that we might confess to the Lord that we have failed to live in his light. Such repentance will bring us back to our call to live as children of light.

One day as I was walking from my office in the Old City of Jerusalem to Jaffa gate, a merchant stopped me and drew my attention to a passing woman and child. He knew she was a Christian and that the handicapped boy she carried came from a Muslim family. He was amazed that she would give such motherly care to a child not her own.

I answered him, “Yes, as Christians, we are called to serve every human being, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, religion or political affiliation. We are called to be light. It is our witness and diakonia.”

We are to live as children of light – and let our light shine – not to draw attention to ourselves or because our salvation depends on us. Rather, we live as children of light because Christ, our light, has given us special gifts to share with the world. We may not be able to convert the world to Christianity. But we can secure the world by sharing God’s grace. We can secure the world by shining Christ’s light into the darkness. We can serve the world by loving each other and all humanity.

This is why the church must be prophetic. It must not only condemn sin but must dare to offer a vision of light to a dark world. It must take seriously the issues of the people she serves. It must embrace all of God’s people, the children of light.

And as the church is made of Christ’s followers, the church is also called to be light. That means that the church must not involve itself in a spirituality of escapism but in a spirituality that addresses human suffering and serves the world by being a light. Through witness and diakonia, the church is a servant, not a master, a carrier of the light and thus a living witness in every sphere of life. The church is to be light shining with the rays of faith, hope, love and forgiveness.

As members of the church, we are called refuse injustice and illuminate the world with God’s light of justice. We are called to work to eradicate poverty, to secure the right to food, to promote the full inclusion of women in society, to condemn human trafficking, to call for just sharing of natural resources, to counter climate change and, above all, to work for justice. We are children of light when we promote justice, forgiveness, peace and reconciliation. We are to be proactive in working to eliminate Islamophobia, xenophobia and antisemitism. In this way the church, the communion of the children of the light, becomes a beacon of hope in hopeless situations.

I sometimes ponder the fact that there have been Christians in Palestine since the first Pentecost. Now we Palestinian Christians are less than 1.5 percent of the population. According to recent studies by Bethlehem University and the Diyar Consortium, Palestinians are leaving the country for three reasons: difficulties caused by the political conflict, a lack of jobs and growing political and religious extremism.

Even so, Palestinian Christianity has survived 2,000 years. We have never ruled the country, nor were we ever in the majority. We do not have much property, power, money or influence. Yet we have survived. And I believe we will survive another 2,000 years. We have survived for the simple reason that we have carried the death and resurrection of our Lord in our bodies, souls and minds. Our strength has always been our witness, in spite of our weakness. The mystery of salvation keeps our hope and our living witness alive. By God’s grace, we carry our light to the world and are ready to pay the price for this. This is why we do not focus on numbers but on the fact that our witness and diakonia are a light in our society. In spite of circumstances, we Palestinian Christians try to continue to be brokers of justice, instruments of peace, ministers of reconciliation, defenders of human rights including women’s rights and apostles of love. I only pray that Christ the light may continue to call us for this holy task of being light in the world, accompanying our sisters and brothers in the world and in Jerusalem.

We ask you to hold us in prayer that God may continue to use us to be light. Pray that the political situation won’t prevent us from being living witnesses and extinguish our light. As sisters and brothers in Christ and fellow light bearers in the world, we should together let our lights shine so that it might see Christ’s light in us and glorify our Father in heaven.

May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Arno Gruen in Loviisa, Finland 7th Aug 2010. Picture: Piretta Pietilä.

We Cannot Survive With Real-Politik

How can we clarify the issues surrounding war and peace, violence and nonviolence, when our view is obscured by the assumption—also promoted by a portion of the scientific establishment—that human evolution advanced solely by means of struggle and competition, that the survival of one species depends on the defeat of another one? We believe in our rational point of view because we are able to push aside our feelings, which we consider to be irrational. Feelings have become a threat for us and must be repressed; therefore, we judge a way of thinking to be realistic if it has been freed of empathy and the capability to share pain, to understand suffering, and to feel a connection with all forms of life. How did this come about?

What is reality if we are constrained from birth to see the world not as we experience it ourselves but as others tell us it is? Before and directly after birth our perceptions are shaped by empathy, not by cognitive intellectual processes. Our early empathic perceptions are direct and immediate, uninfluenced by society’s expectations, and for that reason are true to reality. But from the very first day of life, the way we ought to see the world is communicated to us by others, along with the message that our own perceptions have no validity. Thus, our cognitive perception, based on the expectations of those who raise us, never develops without distortion. This is especially true if these expectations are not in accord with a child’s needs but rather meet with the parents’ need for self-esteem.

We live in cultures that are characterized by competition and insecurity and that make it difficult for people to develop the self-esteem that comes from a sense of one’s inner worth, which can evolve only if people learn to accept and share their suffering, pain, and adversity. This is what enables an inner strength to emerge—informed by an attitude of equanimity in spite of insecurity and of self-confidence in spite of helplessness. Only such a development forms a person’s genuine substance. In cultures that mistake strength for invulnerability, this kind of development is hardly possible because suffering, pain, and helplessness are stigmatized as weakness. This is why parents need their child in order to maintain a self-image of competence and self-assurance without self-doubt. In a culture in which one is constantly faced with the threat of failure, children are needed to enable their parents to maintain a fictitious sense of worth, with the result that parents do not see their children as they are but only in relation to themselves. In spite of their love and hopes for their children, they do not see what their children are really like but view them only in terms of providing approbation of the parental role. The child becomes the means to the end of sustaining the pose of mother and father as authority figures who are decisive and assured in their relationship with their child.

What are children to do who experience weakness, helplessness, pain, and rage? Apathetic and exhausted, they will, with time, submit to the expectations of their parents. But their submission distorts reality, and thus a rational solution later in life to crucial problems such as the question of war and peace is made impossible, for if we have learned from an early age to experience the pose of strength and self-assurance as reality, then “realistic” behavior is not based on reality at all but on our need to cling to this pose as a remedy for our fears and insecurity.

And so a change takes place in our emotional life. Feelings no longer emerge from our own empathically motivated perceptions but are now determined by our need for a sense of invulnerability in order to avoid supposed threats that stem from the terror children experience because their inner self is not given recognition. Only if they fulfill the expectations of their parents, only if they can maintain the emotional contact with their parents that is necessary for survival, do they receive approbation. And because parents themselves were shaped by a culture that scorns pain and suffering as forms of weakness, a culture that bases survival on getting the better of others, vulnerability is therefore seen as a threat to one’s self-esteem. To prevent this from happening we learn to focus our feelings either on acquiring power ourselves or on identifying with those who have power. This means that our feelings—in the larger political realm as well—are no longer influenced by empathic perceptions but by concepts having to do with power, competition, and the need to put down others. As a result, realism then means merely security attained by means of power, positions of power, and actions that assure them. If this mechanism no longer works, war and violence are the only remaining solutions to problems.

A self that develops under these circumstances is not centered on the question of who one is but what one is. Who one is has to do with constantly confronting oneself and, as a result, with taking responsibility for one’s actions, for one’s own being. It has to do with recognizing one’s own pain and the pain of others, with perceiving one’s own boundaries and those of the other person. In the case of the question of what one is, on the other hand, it is not a matter of one’s authentic self but of how one thinks one has to appear in order to gain status and power over others. This is the way people become, as Kierkegaard so convincingly put it, completely in thrall to their need to be recognized for their achievements. Thus, they do not live their own lives but rather lives that revolve around correct appearance. And “correct” here means complying with current concepts of normality.

In this process people begin to falsify their lives by seeking escape in abstract ideas that endow life with false premises, for these ideas are cut off from the empathic needs that make us human and also from the feelings of guilt and shame that arise from this kind of dissociation. This process encourages a cognitive kind of thinking that is cut off from empathic roots. Here lie the sources of the myths and symbols intended to shield us from insecurity and vulnerability. Thus, over millennia conflict, war, competition, and the accumulation of property and riches were the only valid “realities” of our world, and belief in heroism and the myths surrounding it—superhuman strength, insensitivity to pain, invulnerability—predominated. Reality is so transformed as a result that we often no longer recognize ourselves as human beings but merely as abstractions that have internalized these myths as symbols of their own being.

Human evolution cannot be correctly understood if we take it for granted that conflict and competition are the forces behind human development. Peter Kropotkin already pointed this out in 1917; Stanley Diamond, Theodore C. Schneirla, Irven Devore, Melvin J. Konner, Ashley Montagu, and recently Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, among many others, have demonstrated that cooperation and empathy are the determining factors in our evolution and that the survival of one species does not depend on the destruction of another. A false interpretation of Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest provides the basis for this misunderstanding. In Darwin’s view of survival, “fittest” is not equated with “best.” The organism best suited for surviving nuclear war is the cockroach. It would inherit our planet!

“From a biological point of view, love is a determining factor in our evolution,” according to anthropologist Ashley Montagu. He adds, “We can safely assume that none of the early human populations would have survived if love and cooperation had not played a decisive role in their continuing existence.” Schneirla, who studied the approach-and-withdrawal behavior of many species that underlies peaceful-nonaggressive or defensive-aggressive behavior, showed that these mechanisms already exist at birth. Low stimulus intensities as produced by loving maternal behavior create approach reactions; high intensities of stimuli, as evoked by maternal rejection or punishment, lead to muscle contractions and to withdrawal and aggressive defensiveness. In addition, continuous effects of low stimulus intensities form the metabolic system of an individual and thus influence his or her later level of excitation. This in turn leads to basic traits such as readiness for aggressive or cooperative interpersonal behavior.

With the rise of the so-called great civilizations, there developed structures of conquest and subjugation of the defeated peoples. We must assume that this always occurred when a lack of loving care created the emotional need to dominate others in order to compensate for the resulting insecurity. Such situations early in life led to conditions that generally have a disturbing influence on patterns of maternal care-giving and thus bring about the separation of growing humans from their potential for empathy, initiating a form of development that emphasized obedience. Obedience became the instrument by which the developing structures of domination and accumulated wealth assured their position by making identification with those in power the psychic “salvation” from the suffering and powerlessness of the oppressed. This identification, which leads to what the Finnish psychoanalyst Marrti Siirala described as the “delusional possession of reality,” characterizes the “adapted” individual and shows how adaptation often expresses obedience. Obedience to authority thus became the ideal for entire societies. How deeply rooted this phenomenon was can be demonstrated by the paradoxical fact that rebellions initiated in the name of freedom ended by taking on authoritarian power themselves. The outcome of this millennia-long development was described by Proust in the twentieth century as an impossible form of reality: “How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make the slightest move to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is evoked by a lie and consists solely in the need to have our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?”

Here Proust recognized something of fundamental significance, namely, the longing in our obedience-oriented cultures to be saved by those who have caused our suffering, together with the inability to recognize them as responsible for this suffering. Being forced to be obedient while growing up leads to the inability to perceive our own empathic potential because of our anxiety and fear, which must not be acknowledged, since fear and uncertainty are labeled as weakness. Although we are driven by our fear, it must be denied and repressed. Here we can see the vicious circle of our development, which is influenced by a culture that causes parents to experience their infants’ aliveness and high spirits as disturbing or even threatening. As they get older, these children will soon be filled with anxiety and worry and will learn at an early age that their original, authentic self imperils their relationship with their parents and for this reason is bad. As a result, their innermost nature turns into something strange and foreign. And it is this alienated part of one’s self that must be fought against from now on.

The accompanying anxieties grow stronger in times of existential stress—caused, for example, by unemployment, loss of status and personal importance, insecurity inherent in a society based on competition that humiliates and isolates people. These ever-present anxieties are held in check in economic good times owing to the fact that people feel they are part of society. Nowadays people feel secure in their identity, thanks to all the possibilities offered by a consumer society. Possessing things gives them a sense of well-being and thus a kind of identity and the feeling of belonging. But as soon as possessions and consumption are threatened, this false identity breaks down and the ever-menacing anxieties again come to the fore.

Sadly, the chase after possessions leads to increased egotism, which prevents or destroys any attachment to societal values. It leads to moral failure because, as Nobel-Prize-winning dramatist Eugene O’Neill aptly described it in assaying the relationship of the United States to its dependencies, “. . . [The] main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it, thereby losing your own soul and the things outside of it too.” What remains are hatred and the need to find enemies against whom the hatred can be directed. This process was advanced by the victory of the capitalist system over the communist one, a victory that unfortunately rejected the ideas of equality and fairness and destroyed these concepts as a political possibility. Of course, the rich and financially successful have always been accorded more credibility than those who are poor, but this is the case more than ever today. During the Cold War economic megalomania and the irresponsibility inherent in an exaggerated profit motive were reined in, but at present a financial elite with an overweening sense of its own importance has created a worldwide situation in which the gap between rich and poor grows greater by the day.

If democratic governments do not succeed in dealing successfully with the dangerous situation created by this inequality, the ever-present hatred will increasingly express itself as violence. And those who hate themselves the most but are not permitted to recognize their oppressors will seek solutions that are far removed from reality. This opens the way for political leaders who conjure up images of an enemy that give legitimacy to this hatred and who take advantage of it for their own purposes of amassing power.

The enemy we are looking for in order to free ourselves of our hatred we find in the stranger, the Other, who reminds us of ourselves because he is similar to the way we originally were. By punishing him we can hold our head high, at the same time banning anxiety and fear from our consciousness. And the leaders, who in their megalomania incite war and conquest, achieve success because our societies produce people who allow themselves to be enslaved in order to escape their terror. In Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Elektra Orin, a soldier in the American Civil War, tells about the enemies he has killed on the battlefield, realizing the identity between himself and the hated Other, described above: “It was like murdering the same man twice. I had a queer feeling that war meant murdering the same man over and over, and that in the end I would discover the man was myself!”

The way children are raised encourages them not only to bond at an early age with their tormentors but also to idealize them. In this way the structures of domination and the social norms represented by parents, school, and society thoroughly penetrate the psyche of growing children, becoming their determining mechanisms and thus forming their psychic structure. These structures and mechanisms imposed by society stand in the way of children perceiving their own perceptions and needs.

Parents misuse their child to preserve their own sense of adequacy and self-worth. Under these conditions, attachment to the parents exists on two levels: on the one hand, bonding takes place with the parents as they really are in terms of the behavior the child has experienced—their empathy, their meting out of punishment, their exercise of authority; on the second level, a bond is created with an idealized image of the parents. In this case, children must limit their perception of their parents to the image the parents have of themselves, for children cannot simultaneously integrate their actual perception of their parents and the idealized image they have of them. For this reason, knowledge of their parents’ true nature disappears from consciousness. The result is a reversal of reality.

One of my patients, a fifty-year-old geologist, talked about his father, who had volunteered to serve in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. The father was not only extremely authoritarian, he also beat his son for even the slightest transgression. His mother, also subjected to the father’s violence, never tried to protect her son. Only once, when he was very young, did she intervene because she thought the father was going to beat the boy to death in his rage. As an adult, whenever my patient heard a child crying, he became enraged because he interpreted the crying as an attempt to make demands on him. He was afraid that he would hurl a child of his own against the wall in such a situation. Of course, he didn’t want to do that and had decided not to have children. This man did not want to pass on what had been done to him; nevertheless, on an unconscious level he was affected by his identification with his father. His reaction to a crying child corresponded to that of his father to him when he was little. His rage was the rage of his father, whose hatred the son had internalized as his own. In this manner his own being turned into something foreign to him that had to be punished in the external world. The pain he had experienced in childhood became alien to him and was then projected onto children who cried as he had once cried. He was thus punishing in another person the rejected part of himself.

This is how identification with the parents’ self-image becomes the sole reality. On an unconscious level the secret knowledge of the parents’ true nature is the source of a constant anxiety, which cannot be expressed. This anxiety and inner terror lead to hatred of one’s own being. Children protect themselves from their anxiety by clinging to the parents’ pose as the only reality. This process harbors a threat to a democratic society: If children have internalized—that is, have become imprinted with—the pose as reality, then as adults they will regard this pose as the sole valid reality. They will hope for release from their deeply concealed fears by authority figures who display in an especially convincing way the pose of strength, decisiveness, self-confidence, and assurance. The hidden and threatening fear of the truth felt by these adults unleashes rage against everyone who dares to tell the truth. The pose then shapes a reality that is destructive of life.

What can save us from the plight created by alienation from our own feelings? “Paradoxically,” writes His Holiness the Dalai Lama, “we can help ourselves only if we help the Other.” And: “It is the cultivation of love and compassion, our ability to enter into and to share another’s suffering, that are the preconditions for the continued survival of our species. . . . To understand the suffering of others . . . means to possess true empathy . . . . The feeling of community with all living creatures can be attained only if we recognize that we are all basically united and dependent on one another.”

This is why we must ascribe crucial significance to the living interaction between mother and child as a major factor in human evolution and do everything possible to support this process of bonding in its essential role in the development of human consciousness. Our ancestors cannot have been cut off from experiencing pain and suffering as we in great part are today. To quote Ashley Montagu once again: “If we . . . define love as caring behavior that confers survival benefits, then love is a decisive aspect of our evolution.” Our urgent task is to give full support to this human interaction. It is empathy and cooperation—not profit, selfishness, and the drive for ever more bigness—that will lead us toward a more humane civilization than our present one.

Literature

Dalai Lama. Der buddhistische Weg zum Glück. Fischer: Frankfurt, 2004.
__________. Ancient Wisdom, Modern World. Time Warner: London 1999.
Devore, I., Konner, M. J. “Infancy in Hunter-Gatherer Life: An Ethological Perspective. ” In: White, M. F. (ed.). Ethology and Psychiatry. Univertsity of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1974.
Diamond, S. Kritik der Zivilisation. Campus: Frankfurt, 1976.
Gelb, B. and A. O’Neill. Harper & Row: New York, 1973.
Gruen, A.. Der Verlust des Mitgefühls. dtv: München, 1997.
__________. Der Fremde in Uns. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 2000.
__________. Der Kampf um die Demokratie: Der Extremismus, die Gewalt und der Terror. Klett-Cotta: Stuttgart, 2002
__________. “Der Gehorsam. ” In: Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften 13, 441-450, 2002.
__________. “The Role of Empathy and Mother-Child Attachment in Human History and the Development of Consciousness: The Neanderthal’s Gestation” in: Jahrbuch für Psychohistorische Forschung, 6, 2005.
__________. Welt ohne Kriege. Klett-Cotta: Stuttgart, 2006.
Hrdy, S. B. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2009.
Kierkegaard, S. Concluding Unscientific Postcript to the Philosophical Fragment. Ed. Walter Lowrie. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1941.
Kropotkin, P. M. Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Knopf: New York, 1917.
La Boétie, E. Freiwillige Knechtschaft (1550). Klemm/Oelschläger: Münster, 1991.
Milgram, S. Obedience to Authority. Harper: New York, 1974.
Montagu, A. “The Origin and Significance of Neonatal and Infant Maturity.” Journal of the Am. Med. Association, 176, 1961.
___________. GROWING YOUNG. McGraw-Hill: New York, 1981.
O’Neill, E. Mourning Becomes Electra in Three Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Vintage: New York, 1995.
Schneirla, T. C. “Problems in the biopsychology of social organizations.” J. Abnorm. Soc.
Psychology 41, 385-422, 1946.
Sirrala, M. From Transfer to Transference. Therapeia Foundation: Helsinki, 1983.

Translated from the German by Hildegarde Hannum and Hunter Hannum.

Event: Combatants for Peace visiting Lapinjärvi Educational Center
Time: 5th Aug 2010 at 10.15 – 11.45
Place: Lapinjärven koulutuskeskus, Lecture Hall “Sikala”, Latokartanontie 97, Lapinjärvi
Tickets: Free entry
Language: English

My name is Roni and on Aug 2007 I joined the organization Combatants for Peace. Since then I have been an active member and this is My Personal Story.

I grew up in Jerusalem in the 70s, the years of the feeling of euphoria after the 6 day war. I was a youngster and like most of the youth my age, I joined a youth movement. The movement I joined is called Beitar, the movement of the Herut party, which later became the Likud party. I was a right-wing teen and participated in rallies, which supported the building of settlements, which had just started popping up on the hills of the West Bank, while the government shut its eyes.

During that time, my belief was based on the fact that we had just freed holy lands. By chance there was a group of people living there who claimed that they were a nation. A different solution had to be found for them in the Middle East, there are 22 other Arab countries to where they can go, the absolute justice was with us.

In 1975 I joined the IDF and served in an outpost in the Gaza strip. During my service, the Likud party came into power for the first time, and the feeling of my friends and I was that if we were stubborn enough, the Palestinians would give up and leave or accept our authority. We believed that there was no other way.

After I finished my army service I started working for the police in the Department for Minorities in Jerusalem. For the first time I actually had to deal with Palestinians. I learnt their language and customs and I remember how we used to play cat and mouse with the citizens of East Jerusalem. They would try and demonstrate their nationalism in any way possible. They would paint their cars with the flags’ colors and we would fight against any sign of nationalism with persistence and aggressiveness. Needless to say, raising of a Palestinian flag was a serious crime.

In 1983 I left the police forces, and joined the Israeli secret service (Shabak), where I served until 1994 in the occupied territories in different positions where their main aim was fighting terror.

If I look back on where I was then and where I am today, obviously it was a long process. I didn’t wake up one morning with a new political understanding. It was a process that started years ago, in its midst I found myself dealing with large cracks forming in the belief of the righteousness of my way, of my country and the gap widened until I couldn’t carry on wavering on both side. I chose a way that seemed more natural to me, one that promotes peace and equality.

The best way to describe the way in which change happened in me is to refer to a few points of reference in my past.

During the end of the 80s’ the first uprising (‘Intifada’) broke out. This was truly a national uprise and it even took the Palestinian organizations time to figure out what was happening, to come to sense with it and to control the masses. During the first weeks the real heroes were the masses. In many places on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip the masses marched fearlessly towards the IDF. For the first time I encountered youngsters and adults that picked their heads up, their eyes were sparkling and they were filled with pride and persistence, they believed that they were creating their country, that nothing could stop them. And as for myself, who I was working in the secret service, met not with terrorists (for those people it was obvious who is good and who is bad) but with a nation that was rebelling. Suddenly I caught myself, I who in my childhood had dreamed of the Jewish underground heroes, dreamed of their fight against the British occupation, they were prepared to sacrifice themselves to be freed from being an occupied nation, and suddenly I was on the other side of this equation, and this was the first fracture that started crumbling my belief. My duty was not an easy one even if I still believed, we are defending our country, and still there was a gap between the fact that you had to be evil to someone during your job, and then come home to peace and quiet, have a bath and hug your wife and kids. This gap is very difficult to deal with, but when you start doubting what you are actually doing, it becomes completely unbearable.

The second point I would like to address is the house where I grew up. I was born in Baqa neighborhood in Jerusalem (this is the Arab name of the neighborhood that is used until today). I grew up in an Arab house, which to me meant a house with high ceilings, nice tiled floors and thick walls. The fact that in the past Arabs lived there didn’t occur to me at all. In 1967 right after the 6 day war, when I was 10, a few Arabs knocked on our door, and they told us in broken English that they used to live in the house once, and they asked to see it. That was an embarrassing and strange situation, what do we do? And what to they want? I mean this house is obviously ours. Anyways we let them in, they looked around and left, and we haven’t heard from them since. I presume we weren’t very kind to them. This moment has been engraved in my memory ever since.

In 2006 I went with my mother to Romania to see where my roots were. In other words, where she ran away from after the Second World War. We went to the tiny remote village where she was born. It was a deserted village in northern part of the country and we looked for the house she used to live in. Today, obviously Romanians inhabit it since they are almost no Jews left in the area. We didn’t find the house, so we knocked on the door of a neighboring house. Someone opened and asked what we wanted? We explained and they were very unfriendly. Then I suddenly realized, this is an identical story to the one that happened in my childhood, with the original residents of the house I grew up in.

Both people, Palestinian and Israeli, are connected to each other through history, and our stories are so similar that it’s nearly impossible to understand. We, children of refugees from Europe, fulfilled our dream of a Jewish state, by making another nation into refugees. We, who have been a driven minority for our entire history, are ruling another nation today. The fact that our only way of ruling them is oppressing them, on the one hand and preventing them any ability nationalism or equality on the other. How come we have changed our skin and in what manner are we managing to justify it to ourselves?

This story doesn’t have good guys or bad ones, just stories that intertwine with each other.

The third point of my story concerns the time I lived abroad. During the years 2000-2007 I lived abroad and it enabled me to get a different perspective on the life in the Middle East. I found out that there are more nations that have fought one another in this world but have found peaceful ways to live together and look forward to a better future. In 2007, at a time close to my return, I saw a video clip of an opening of a sewage pipe near the settlement Efrat. In order to do so they had to uproot an olive grove of a neighboring Arab village. The inhabitants of the village appealed to the supreme court of justice but lost the case, the video showed the picture of the exact moment that the trucks entered the grove. I saw in this video two scenarios that in my opinion closed the picture of the transformation I had been going through during the last few years. The first was a picture of the Palestinian farmers standing helpless and crying, but what caught my heart was the fact that on their side were young Israelis that were hugging them and crying together with them. I didn’t know this type of solidarity. A second picture that was engraved in my head was of the soldiers that were guarding the bulldozers, walking beside them with clubs in their hands, feeling like kings. My son was supposed to go into the army the following year and the thought of it shocked me.

It took me a while until I was able to tell this story. It took me time until I was able to explain to myself what was happening here. I am sure in the justice of our way, I know that I belong to minority here in Israel, but we are determined. You cannot rule another nation for a long period of time and there is no way to lead a humanitarian occupation. There is no way to be evil to others with out letting this evil penetrate into our lives.

I feel that we are the true bearers of the spirit of Judaism, which means that one needs to acknowledge the right of another even if they aren’t Jewish. The Israeli policy in the occupied territories has been established and based on controlling, stealing and politically oppressing another nation. The magic word for it is “security” but all these aren’t phrases of Judaism and what my country signifies at the moment towards the Palestinian people and to a big part of the world is the ugliest side of humanity.

I am not sure how most of the citizens in this country ignore the situation, and this includes some of my friends and family. How could they be more worried about the starving animals in the zoo in Gaza during the war, than the hundreds of children that were killed by us during the war? We are carrying with us the slogans of laws and security for nothing and on the West Bank, we signify the exact opposite to Judaism and Zionism.

As I understand this reality, neither side (Israeli or Palestinian) will give up; we won’t go back to Europe and they won’t leave the area. We don’t have the ability to control another nation which is half of our size, it is just not possible. Not by force, not by financial succession and not in any other manner. And there is no way that one can hold a democratic government when under its occupation you have millions of people that don’t have equal rights. The same way that in South Africa you couldn’t have a democratic government while there was apartheid.

Controlling by force doesn’t just harm the occupied nation but the occupier as well. The violence penetrates back to us as our economy can’t strive for ever, and all the values that we were educated on are trampled over in the occupied territories. We need to free ourselves from the occupation maybe even more than the Palestinians need to free themselves. We cannot be the “only enlightened democracy in the Middle East”, when people of a village that is only 10 minutes from where I live are prevented minimal human rights by my own country, just because of their origin.

Assessments of different struggles in the world always show that it ends in negotiation and some compromise.

Dezmand Tutu said “ A man is a man when he approves of others as human beings” and old Hillel said “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn” .

Some times people say that I have gentle soul (we call it ‘Yefe Nefesh’ in Hebrew), even though this statement has become a derogatory statement to say that leftists are ‘Arab lovers’. I am actually proud of this term, exactly in the same manner that I see myself as an Israeli patriot.

Event: Jerusalem – City of Peace? seminar
Time: Sat 7th Aug 2010 at 14 – 16
Place: Kino Marilyn, Kuningattarenk 17, Loviisa.
Tickets: Free entry
Language: English

Munib Younan, Bishop of Evangelical Lutheran Church in Palestine and Jordan, will be speaking in Loviisa Peace Forum Seminar 7th of Aug 2010. The seminar is going to be held in English. An other video clip of Younan speaking and following comments about him can be found from Religion & Ethics Newsweekly -pages: “Bishop Younan is a person of God and of peace. He needs and deserves the attention of the international community.” (Mary Anderson). “Bishop Munib Younan has been a tireless voice for peace with justice. He needs to be heard globally, especially by people in the U.S.” Said Ailabouni. “Bishop Younan speaks on behalf of the voiceless and the marginalized. An authentic Christian voice in the Middle East promoting values of the Kingdom.” (Rev. Dr. Eardley Mendis)