By Susan Abulhawa
This week, amidst the incredible ongoing mass hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners, some of them on the brink of starvation, the Methodist Church failed to pass a resolution to divest from three major beneficiaries of the most incendiary human rights abuses and colonial crimes of our time.
Among the heartbreaking collection of ignorant statements, delegates had the audacity to claim that divestment was divisive and counterproductive to peace. Many things in this conflict are divisive and counterproductive to peace. A 30-foot concrete wall with guard towers not unlike those that once encircled the Warsaw ghetto, is divisive and counterproductive to peace. Policies of the state purposely designed to make human beings, entire Palestinian families and communities, homeless, through systematic and regular home demolitions, is divisive and counterproductive to peace. The arrest, detention, torture of Palestinian children is divisive and counterproductive to peace. The indefinite imprisonment of Palestinians without charge or trial is divisive and counterproductive to peace. Outright land theft, that Israel makes no pretense of hiding, is divisive and counterproductive to peace. Siphoning of water so Jews can have swimming pools while Palestinians must ration water is divisive and counterproductive to peace. 954 checkpoints and barriers peppered throughout the West Bank to impede movement of Palestinians, is divisive and counterproductive to peace. “Battle testing” new weaponry on a principally unarmed civilian population with no place to run or hide is divisive and counterproductive to peace. Jewish-only housing and roads are divisive and counterproductive to peace. They are the epitome of Apartheid and Apartheid is divisive and counter basic human dignity.
Divesting from three of the chief corporate beneficiaries of these crimes that aim to wipe an entire native population off the map is NOT divisive. It is, in fact, a token expression of decency that acknowledges the basic humanity of Palestinians. It is a symbolic show of solidarity with an oppressed people who are facing imminent demise. And in that way, it was the smallest test of morality, which the United Methodist Church has so shamefully failed.
So there is no mistake of what this decision means, let me be very clear. Through their words, actions, and financial investment, the United Methodist Church supports:
1) Caterpillar, for supplying the bulldozers and other earth eviscerating equipment used by Israel to demolish the homes, farms, and orchards of human beings whose primary crime (let us not lie!) is that they are non-Jewish natives living on property Israel wants to steal and hand over to Jewish residents, most often imported from other countries.
2) Hewlett-Packard, for providing advanced biometric technology that effectively monitor and confine 5 million human beings (all non-Jewish, of course) into small enclaves and open-air prisons.
3) and Motorola, for furnishing surveillance equipment for illegal, Jewish-only colonies built on confiscated Palestinian land.
For an analogy of the meaning, change the date and the names of companies, perhaps to those that benefited from transporting Jews to death camps, or those that supplied weapons used to mow down schoolboys in Soweto, or bus lines that made Black folk sit in the back and give up their seats for Whites. Who would call divesting from such abominations divisive and counterproductive to peace? And tell me the difference between the behavior of those companies and the three aforementioned.
Kairos, and people of conscience tried to find something positive in this ignominy, claiming it a victory for those fighting for justice because the divestment debate itself ignites a conversation from which there is no retreat. I don’t deny the truth in that. But it is wrong to stop there because it was so much more than that. It was an utter disgrace, blight on the church of the same magnitude as that which comes from the institutional failure to speak up for Jews in the late 1930s.
And when juxtaposed to the courage, principled fortitude, and ineffable will of 1500 human beings with nothing but their hunger to protest Israel’s systematic destruction of Palestinian society, the actual natives of the Holy Land, the decision of the United Methodist Church delegates becomes vulgar and unforgivable.
Just this week alone, a woman in Gaza was shot by Israeli soldiers, who opened fire on farmers working on their own land in Khuzaa, east of Khan Younis. In a previous incident of Israeli target practice on Monday, another Palestinian farmer was short in the same area.
On Wednesday, Israeli bulldozers demolished 13 sheds and tents belonging to the Al-Jahalin Bedouin tribe, near Jerusalem, leaving several families without shelter for themselves of their livestock. These ancient dwellers of the land have been particularly hard hit by Israel’s ethnic cleansing policies, as their homes are routinely destroyed and they are pushed off their lands as if cattle in broad daylight.
Also on Wednesday, soldiers forcibly evicted a Palestinian family from their home in Beit Hanina and moved Jewish settlers in their place, a scandalously racist Israeli practice that has escalated in and around Jerusalem to Judaize historically Palestinian areas.
At the same time, Israeli settlers this week constructed 20 new homes on privately owned Palestinian land in an illegal outpost known as Ulpana, in Beit El settlement northeast of Ramallah.
There were at least 57 military incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip just this week alone!
Reverend Alex Joyner, who opposed the resolution said, “We are all concerned about the suffering and the ongoing occupation, because it is hurting Israeli and Palestinian society. But what the church has said is we want a positive step, and we reject punitive measures as a way of trying to bring peace.”
His platitudes and patronizing drivel aside, what measures, pray tell, does the Reverend Joyner propose to bring peace to Palestinian children who are systematically terrorized and traumatized by Israel to the point that 98.6% of them suffer from symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)? Or to the hundreds of children kidnapped in the middle of the night from their families and thrown into jails where their fragile spirits waste away without charge, without trial, without mercy?
The United Methodist Church had a historic opportunity to take a moral stand, however unpopular but undoubtedly moral. Instead, they took a decision that moves them toward the realm of moral irrelevancy.
But to all Palestinians, to all people of conscience and to those Methodists who stood on the right side of justice, where Jesus would undoubtedly stand, take heart! Take heart! Palestinians may be starving, languishing, and bleeding, but Israel and her backers are rotting at their core, because that’s what racism, self-interest at all costs, and cowardice does to the soul.
Take heart and do not despair. We have not reached the end of history. There is still blood in our veins, air in our lungs, and brilliant souls in our wombs. They have but the cold steel of death machines and the moral void of lies, which cannot and will not prevail against naked hearts and empty stomachs taking up the good fight for freedom.
– Susan Abulhawa is the author of Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury 2010) and the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine (www.playgroundsforpalestine.org). She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
