Dr. John Young, Minister 3/13/08

Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville

Jews and Palestinians Overcoming Their Own Extremisms

Barry Goldwater, a maverick Senator from Arizona, was the Republican candidate for President in 1964. In his nomination acceptance speech, Goldwater used the sentence that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” That’s the problem, when people are thinking about preserving or gaining their own liberty nothing seems too extreme, violence seems necessary rather than evil. Doing justice in the world, while it certainly requires assertiveness and fortitude, rarely if ever can actually be achieved through extremism. Violence in defense of liberty ends up having all sorts of undesirable and unforeseen consequences. This is the quandary that much of the world has gotten into in their desires for liberty for their particular group.

In the mid 20^th century, this became a fact of life in the Middle East when the Western powers sanctified a Jewish state in Israel, and in so doing allowed for the Palestinians, who had lived on these lands for centuries, to become a stateless people. The enormous tragedy of the Holocaust with its 6 million Jewish deaths and immeasurable displacement and suffering laid an overwhelming guilt trip on the world; since most of the world had done nothing or been too little too late to stop the Holocaust, including most of the surviving 2/3s of the Jews themselves. It seemed that the least the world could do to make amends was to support the Zionist’s passionate efforts for a Jewish state on Palestinian lands. The world tried to make amends for the Holocaust by expropriating the Palestinians. They produced millions of new refugees, stateless or colonized Palestinians. In helping the Jews to gain their liberty by creating their own country, the world had produced systematic and enduring injustices for the Palestinians.

Unitarian Universalists are probably as close to progressive Jews as any other religious community. We share significant aspects of common faith including: 1. a spiritual practice of critical dialogue with the ultimate powers of reality, 2. a focus on individual and community freedom and responsibility, 3. a clear emphasis on practical ethics as central to our religious lives, for individuals, groups and institutions, 4. a sense of democratic congregational leadership in which all people are potential prophets and seers, and 5. a shared commitment to face our own mistakes, own up to them, make amends for them, and out of these efforts to change our future behavior.

In that context, I am, like most of our congregation and denomination, enthusiastically pro-Jewish and supporters of a democratic and inclusive state of Israel. I had the blessing of visiting Israel in 1974, and I have worked with Jewish colleagues and congregation members throughout my 40 years of UU ministry. However, I am also, like many Jews and many Israelis, a firm believer that Palestinians deserve their own country and that grave injustices have been done to the Palestinian people that need to be rectified by systematic Israeli, American and international actions. This is true not only for the liberty and justice of Jews and Palestinians but for there to be any hope for lasting peace in the Middle East as a whole and for any prayer of genuine reconciliation between the Western world and the vast majority of Islamic peoples throughout the world. This is not just a desirable possibility; it is an absolute global necessity.

There needs to be a Palestinian state that includes all of the land that Israel has seized since 1967. It needs to have geographic integrity, and the United States needs to take half of its total present aid to Israel and give it to support a viable Palestinian state, and negotiate with the half dozen Middle Eastern countries with significant Palestinian populations so that they also support a Palestinian state to make it viable. Both Israel and Palestine will still be multi-cultural and multi-religious states, but both need an opportunity to make their nations effective without oppressing or attacking the other. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians will do this without systematic pressure and support from the United States, and the United States cannot do it without diplomatic patience and courage and significant financial commitment. It remains the fastest way to improve the present tensions with the Islamic world and the most effective way to lessen the terrorist threat because its chronic wound will be getting healed.

What I want to do with the rest of this sermon is to put the issues in a larger context which questions the continued viability of liberating peoples by creating and supporting additional nation-states. Right now, the Kurds are the largest stateless people, and one way or another, there will probably evolve a Kurdish state in what has been northern Iraq. But 20% of Turkey’s people are Kurds, and significant portions of Syria and Iran are Kurds. An excellent briefing on page 13 of The Week magazine for March 28, 2008, points out that there are presently 200 territories or ethnic groups seeking independence from their mother countries throughout the world. In Europe alone since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there are 18 new countries. After 60 years of imperialist rule, the majority of Tibetans still want their freedom from China. Many people in Quebec want to be separate from Canada. Belgium seems to be breaking apart, and we have seen the Balkan states sub-divide like an amoeba. The former Russian state of Georgia has two tiny regions that want their own independence.

Many people still seem to prefer to live in an ethnic enclave, but there are millions of other people like me, and probably many UUs, who choose to live in a consciously multi-cultural and diverse community. Certainly it is simpler if there is a common language and shared perceptions about appropriate behavior, law, and civil order, but those can be established in a multi-cultural, diverse entity, whether that is a neighborhood, city, state, or nation. I would propose that the world stop granting national status to ethnic enclaves. Let people who seek such homogeneity stew together but focus on developing integrated communities where the genuine power structures are more super-national-regional, international and global entities. Obviously the economic and social systems are rapidly moving in that direction, and it is time for the political institutions to catch up. I do not revere nations or peoples. I revere natural reality and humanity. I think my grandchildren will grow into world citizens who are part of a multi-ethnic, pluralistic majority who achieve human progress through learning from the best solutions and wisdom of many peoples not getting stuck in the ethnic dead-ends and prejudices of any particular ethnicity.

I feel more at home and more akin to many people officially very different from me, while I would be a stranger where I grew up in a small town in Kansas, and continue after 9 years to feel isolated in many ways from my most officially homogeneous neighbors here in Jacksonville. I think that we need to systematically diminish the power of those who retain their power on the basis of ethnic identity and prevalent fears and hatreds.

In Israel and Palestine, there are clear majorities who want peace and could figure out ways to get along with each other. The present political systems in the world too often continue to reward the extremists who seek some version of final, narrow ethnic victories based on revenge and violence or who actively and implicitly seek a quick end to the world in favor of some rapturous fantasy afterlife. These are the extremist forces in every culture which need to be patiently and courageous overcome. These are the angry and extreme forces within our own communities and personalities that produce mental illness and social pathologies. Our friend Professor David Swain-Baird has talked to us about Peace Now and the millions of Israelis who want and actively seek peace and reconciliation. Unfortunately, the monstrosity of the Holocaust continues to blind most Americans to the civilized and peaceful forces within the Palestinian Intifada. Actually young Palestinian activists created the term Intifada in the 1980s because Intifada means ‘shaking off’ of occupation to replace the language of demolishing, destroying or defeating. The original process of Intifada was systematically nonviolence, open, and focused upon the development of freedoms with mutual justice, not liberty by the elimination of opponents. Its original goals were transformation and resolution, not destruction, defeat, or despair.

At least of few of you at this point are probably bemoaning that your minister is again making a political speech about global issues about which nothing can be done and which should not be part of a religious service. Let me simply remind you that there are 7 UUA principles and that the 6^th of those is: “the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.” The only way we are going to get some where on such a goal is to get effectively involved in such issues as the ones I have raised today. Secondly, some of our fundamentalist neighbors, evangelical Christians as well as some reactionary Jews, are spending thousands of dollars supporting new Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories in order to speed up the end of the world. Are we, as progressive activists going to leave all of the international activism to the forces of reaction?

However, I also issued today a set of deeper and more personal challenges to us all. I challenge you to extricate yourselves from living in any ethnic enclaves. I challenge you to become a living bridge of love and justice across the barriers of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, age, and life style. We cannot actually become a global village until you have close friends who are really different from you in these stereotypic ways. They may all become your soul mates, and you will be making the best of the American dream come true. We need to stand up against prejudice, hate, and false divisions wherever and whenever they raise their cancerous tentacles. These angry and extreme forces exist not only in people we feel estranged from but also exist within our own communities and personalities. They produce many of our own fears, angers, and neuroses, and they produce many of our own social pathologies. These extremisms need to be overcome within our own communities and even within our own hearts and personalities. The forces of fear, hate, and division will not give up without prolonged and patient efforts, whether it is within the ancient Holy Land or within the most intimate recesses of our own souls.