Talk given to Sarnia Central United Church, October 23, 2016
Let’s look today at a small country on the eastern Mediterranean that has three names. History knows it as Palestine. It is now ruled by the state of Israel. And for adherents of three great world religions, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, it is a land of veneration and pilgrimage, the Holy Land.
For seventy years now this land has been torn by incessant conflict between two populations, now roughly equal in number: Jewish Israelis, most of whom arrived in the last century; and the land’s age-old residents, the Palestinians. Peace negotiations have collapsed and hopes for a settlement are at a low ebb.
By one report, during the last year of relative calm, 230 residents have been killed in violent clashes – 200 Palestinians and 30 Israelis. In the first week of October, one Palestinian was killed and seven wounded in Israeli-occupied territories.
During that week the Israeli army conducted 54 raids into Palestinian communities, in which 46 people were abducted and jailed, including seven children. The olive groves of two Palestinian farm families were bulldozed.
As of September, there were more than 400 Palestinian children detained in Israeli jails, mainly for throwing stones at the Israeli army.
Yet the Israeli government has full control of the territory and enjoys an immense superiority of military force: tanks and jet planes against rocks. The U.S. has just granted it another $38 billion in military aid. And all that weaponry has not brought peace.
The conflict is rooted in Israeli law and policy, which deprives nearly half the population of political rights and, increasingly, of their lands.
Tragic irony
Israeli Jews and Palestinians are each, in their way, victims of a great historic injustice. Jews who came to Palestine fled Europe to escape endemic anti-Semitism. It was expressed most brutally in the Holocaust that killed millions of Jews, including most of my family. Many Jewish refugees came here, as I did, and became Canadians.
Others went to Palestine, the historic birthplace of our Jewish religion as it is of yours. And there they became enmeshed in an effort to dispossess and displace the resident population – Palestinians who are descendents of the ancient Hebrews of the days of Jesus and the prophets. My father, as a young man, was among those Jewish settlers, although he later sought a better life in France.
The victims of one great historic injustice thus themselves became the agents for inflicting injustice on an innocent population.
What a tragedy for Palestine. In contrast to Europe, Palestine had been marked by the coexistence of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities and religious toleration. Now it became infected with European diseases: colonialism, communal hatred, and ethnic cleansing. And how sad that my people, including members of my family – Jewish victims of European intolerance – became unwitting agents for inflicting these evils on Palestine.
In 1948, when Israel was established, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were driven out. Today three million UN-recognized Palestinian refugees reside in camps outside of Israel-Palestine. Others remained, clinging to fragments of their ancient homeland in Palestine and Israel – now six million. The conflict remains unresolved to this day.
Lessons from my life
The situation in Palestine and Israel cries out for reconciliation and tolerance. But how will that be achieved? Perhaps there is a lesson in the story of my own life.
When I was born in Paris in 1941, much of France was under Nazi occupation, and the rest was ruled by the pro-Nazi “Vichy” regime. A massive campaign of hatred and discrimination against Jews was raging across the country.
The French police were rounding up Jews by the tens of thousands and throwing them into French concentration camps. There they were handed over to the Nazis, sent to Auschwitz, and murdered. The Nazis’ evil plan was to kill all the Jews, even infants like me. Among the victims was my mother, killed in Auschwitz in 1943.
But amid this terrible slaughter, an inspiring thing happened. There was a wave of revulsion in France against the treatment of the Jews. Both spontaneously and through organizations, French people made arrangements to protect them.
Altogether, three-quarters of the French Jews escaped the Holocaust. I was among them. In 1943, a resistance organization took charge of my care and placed me with a peasant family in Auvergne, a farming region in south-central France. Some ten thousand Jewish children were saved by being hidden or smuggled out of the country.
Last year I went back to Auvergne to learn how it was that I had been saved. I spoke to many people who remembered those years. Auvergne at that time was a land of refuge, a poor region, but one where there was food and much work to be done. Most of the people who gave refuge, who hid, fed, and welcomed the refugees, were Christians. Many were Protestants of the United Church of France who had themselves suffered persecution in the past.
They welcomed refugees from Italy, from Spain, from German-occupied regions. And there were thousands of Jewish refugees in Auvergne, old and young, seeking safety from arrest by French and German authorities.
I met a Christian man who led his community in providing refuge. His name is René Raoul; he is now more than ninety years old. When he was twenty years old, he helped hide and protect 130 Jewish people who had come to seek safety in his little town, Malzieu. He was ready to lay down his life for them.
René exemplifies the spirit of universalism – one of solidarity with all humanity. This is a proud Jewish tradition – the tradition of my family. In terms of Hitler’s Holocaust, its meaning is “never again” – but not just with regard to Jews. It means “Never again for humankind.”
Drawing on traditions of decency and hospitality rooted in community, faith, and conviction, thousands of individuals forged ties of friendship. Unknown to them, all these little links joined in a great chain of solidarity that not only saved lives but profoundly altered the course of their society.
Toward coexistence
How can this spirit of human solidarity embrace the troubled peoples of Palestine and Israel?
This is very much a Canadian problem. Since Israel’s foundation and the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, Canada has been deeply engaged in this situation. The lines of conflict extend deeply into Canadian society.
So let’s consider the policy of the Canadian government. In recent years, Canada fell into disrepute when, almost alone among the world’s countries, it uncritically backed the Israeli government’s wars. Even so, Canada’s formal, written policy, although ambiguous, include several commitments essential to resolving the conflict:
- Support of Palestinian self-determination.
- Support of a just solution to the plight of the nearly five million registered Palestinian refugees.
- Opposition to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories and to Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem.
- Insistence that Israeli control of the occupied territories is not permanent and that Israel as an occupying power is obliged to treat the occupied population humanely.
- Opposition of the separation wall that Israel has built around the remaining Palestinian communities.
The positions I have mentioned point toward reconciliation.
We should also note the engagement of the United Church of Canada with Palestine and Israel. The church is rightly concerned with the denial of rights and mistreatment of Palestinians, whether Muslim or Christians. About 120,000 Christian Palestinians have managed to remain in the country, where they are a fragile and persecuted minority.
Unlike Christian societies in Europe, they never persecuted their Jewish neighbours. Nor did the Muslim majority in Palestine. Yet they are now forced to suffer for the anti-Jewish crimes of less tolerant societies.
Palestinian Christians have built an outstanding center of ecumenical theology, called Sabeel, meaning “the way.” It seeks peace and justice in Palestine and Israel. I am proud to be among the Jewish supporters of Friends of Sabeel in North America.
The United Church has a long record of engagement with Palestine and Israel. It is reflected in your congregation’s generous support to a destitute Palestinian widow in Ramallah. It is expressed in a current effort featured on its website, called: “Unsettling Goods: Choosing Peace in Palestine and Israel.”
The Church focuses on the obstacle to peace posed by continuing illegal expansion of Jewish Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian territories. These settlers are now the majority in 60% of occupied Palestinian territories on the West Bank territory as well as in East Jerusalem.
The Church calls on us to take part in a global effort for peace in Palestine and Israel around the theme “Dismantling Barriers.” This is a reference to the scriptural passage from Ephesians chapter two, “God has broken down the dividing walls.”
We can draw hope for Palestine and Israel from the recent history in South Africa. That country was long marked by bitter exclusion and oppression of the Black majority. But they found a road to reconciliation through a series of dramatic steps for human rights and social justice. They established the universal right to vote and abolished all discriminatory laws.
Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, two leaders of this reconciliation process, both stressed how similar Palestine is to what they faced in South Africa.
Eleven years ago, a conference of 170 Palestinian civil society organizations proposed three principles for a settlement in Palestine and Israel:
- End Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands and tear down the Separation Wall.
- Grant full equality to Palestinian citizens of Israel.
- Respect the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated by the United Nations [Resolution 194].
This is a path that can assure the wellbeing and security of both the Palestinian and the Israeli Jewish population and lead to reconciliation in the Holy Land.
Whatever your personal views, I welcome this opportunity to meet you and hear your opinions. Such dialogue is in itself a step toward a much-needed reconciliation. We can join in the great chain of solidarity that will help open the road to peace and justice in Palestine and Israel.