Tutu: Palestine and Apartheid

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Friends of SABEEL Conference
Boston - 27 October 2007

PALESTINE AND APARTHEID

Preamble

Dear Friends, it is a great privilege to be with you again since 2002. As you know, my address then has recently been in the news because on the basis of a distortion of what I said, President Dease of St Thomas University decided I shouldn’t visit his campus. It is good that he has since reversed his decision. I commend him for his courage in admitting publicly that he was wrong. It is never easy to do that. I hope that he will reinstate Professor Cris Toffolo. I have received the President’s invitation in which he makes a very handsome apology which I have accepted. I am happy to accept his invitation provided it can be fitted into my schedule and if Professor Toffolo is reinstated with no adverse comment in her academic file arising from this unfortunate episode.

I thank God for my Hebrew antecedents. I thank God that I too am a descendant of Abraham. I give thanks to God for the gift of the Holy Scriptures made up substantially of the Hebrew Scriptures forming what we conventionally refer to as our Old Testament. Even our New Testament which would be distinctively Christian, is incomprehensible without taking its Jewish setting seriously. For instance Jesus is the Greek for Joshua who led God’s people into the Promised Land and Christ is the Anointed One, in Hebrew - the Messiah, whose coming was predicted in the Jewish scriptures and who was longed for so poignantly by the Jews.

I tell you nothing you do not already know. I refer to it all only to assert that spiritually I am of Hebrew descent. That legacy has been of crucial importance to me in our struggle against Apartheid.

Our Anti-Apartheid Struggle

At the height of the struggle when apartheid’s repression was at its most vicious and it seemed indeed as if the apartheid rulers were firmly ensconced in power, when they had all but knocked the stuffing out of their opponents and they were strutting the stage as invincible cocks of the walk, then we turned to the inspiration of our Hebrew tradition and antecedents.

We were able to revive and sustain our people’s hope for their vindication and the ultimate triumph of good over evil, of freedom over injustice and oppression by our references to our biblical traditions. It was often quite exhilarating. I remember once when there had been a massacre in one of our townships which had been instigated by a sinister Third Force linked to the apartheid security apparatus, our bishops suspended a session of Episcopal Synod to be there as Ezekiel had been with the stunned exiles, to be there in a ministry of presence, and we held a service in one of our ghetto township churches. The people were stunned, devastated by the naked violence of the massacre. I preached and used Exodus 3:1-9, God’s words which Yahweh asked Moses to announce to the children of Israel, I said, “Our God is not deaf – our God has heard our cries; our God is not stupid – God knows our suffering; our God is not blind – God has seen and sees our pain and anguish and….yes, our God will come down and set us free.” Yes, our God will come down to open the prison doors and lead our leaders from prison, lead them back from exile. For we had learned from our Jewish tradition that God, our God, is notoriously biased, forever taking the side of the weak, the oppressed, the downtrodden against the kings and the powerful oppressors. Our God had been met first, not in the sanctuary, but in the mundane world of politics, taking the side of a rabble of slaves against the mighty Pharaoh. God is not neutral, God sided with Uriah the Hittite against his favourite, King David after his adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah. Thou art the man. Anywhere else the king could have got away with both actions, but not in Israel. It really seemed as if the Jewish scriptures were written specifically for us. The story of Naboth’s vineyard and King Ahab and Jezebel being confronted on Yahweh’s behalf by Elijah seemed to have been written especially with our situation in mind, where blacks (not exclusively, but overwhelmingly) were shipped in their millions like so many pawns in population removal schemes and dumped in poverty stricken Bantustan homelands, hardly able to eke out a living, cut off from the more affluent so-called white South Africa.

The widow, the orphan and the alien, who in most traditional societies would be the weakest of the weak seemed to be particular favourites with God who appeared to have a soft spot for them. And so worship of God’s people however elaborate and ritually correct would be dismissed as an abomination, unless it made the worshipper have the sensitivity to care for God’s favourites (Is.1:11-16). Even something so obviously religious as a fast was rejected out of hand by this God who could declaim that the kind of fast He wanted was that which fed the hungry, set free the captives – all thoroughly secular activities but which confirmed Yahweh’s bias in favour of and concern for those who were hard done by, who were at the end of their tether, who were so low they could crawl under a snake. We could multiply references to the prophets Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, et al. It reverberated throughout the prophetic writings, this concern for the poor, the hungry, the downtrodden, the widow, the orphan, the alien.

But it was not just in the prophetic oracles. It was so also in the Pentateuch, the Torah, the scriptures par excellence for God’s chosen. Extraordinarily in what was perhaps the book most concerned for cultic ritual matters, Leviticus, where holiness referred most frequently to ritual cultic purity, the worshipper, the Israelite is bidden to be holy as Yahweh is holy and just when we imagined that this would be concerned with ritual holiness, we are brought up short that this is a holiness that plays itself out in a concern for the hungry, the poor. “Be holy even as your God is holy”, and so you must not glean your fields clean at harvest, leave something for the poor and hungry too (Lev.19:1,98). Fantastic – God’s special people must be holy but this is a holiness that expresses itself in mundane acts of caring, of kindness and compassion, of humanitarian concern. In Deuteronomy the motive for doing acts of kindness to God’s favourites, the widow, the orphan and the alien is not emulating God’s holiness, it is the memory of their former status as slaves in Egypt. That memory, it is implied, would prevent them from inflicting on others the kind of anguish they had experienced. They would never do to others, it is assumed, what had been done to them.

I think they are words to be written in letters of gold as pertinent to the situation we are in.

Deuteronomy 24:17-22

“You shall not pervert the justice due to the sojourner or to the fatherless, or take a widow’s garment in pledge; but you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this.

When you reap your harvest in your field, and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow; that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.

When you beat your olive trees, you shall not go over the boughs again; it shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.

When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not glean it afterward; it shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.

You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I command you to do this.”

That is how the people of this God were expected to behave. If you were set to rule over these people as king these were as it were your marching orders, your manifesto, found in the book of Psalms (Psalm 72:1-4,12-14)

“Give the king thy justice, O God, and thy righteousness to the royal son!

May he judge thy people with righteousness, and the poor with justice!

Let the mountains bear prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness!

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor!

For he delivers the needy when he calls, the poor and him who has no helper.

He has pity on the weak and he needy, and saves the lives of the needy.

From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight.”

The three sections of the Hebrew scriptures – the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings are unanimous in their depiction of the nature of the God revealed in these books.

It was exhilarating preaching to the oppressed and downtrodden. The well to do, the powerful often complained that we were mixing religion with politics and we would declare that we were doing no more than in fact preaching the Gospel. We would be accused of being political and I retorted “I don’t know which Bible you are reading” and “I must say I have never heard the poor complain”, “Bishop Tutu now you’re being political!” If anything they could possibly have said, “You are not political enough.”

And God vindicated us. Apartheid’s rulers bit the dust as all oppressors have done always, for this is a moral universe, right and wrong matter. It cannot happen that evil, injustice and oppression can have the last word. No, ultimately goodness, justice, freedom – these will prevail.

What is this to the point?

I could have spent a great deal of time rehearsing what we all know. How I experienced a deja vu when I saw a security check point which Palestinians had to negotiate most of their lives that I was reminded so painfully of the same checkpoints in apartheid South Africa, when arrogant white policemen treated almost all blacks like dirt, or, when someone pointed to a house in Jerusalem and said that used to be our home, but now it has been taken over by the Israelis, which made me recall so painfully similar statements in Cape Town by coloureds who had been thrown out of their homes and relocated in ghetto townships some distance from town. I could have bemoaned the illegal wall that has encroached on Palestinian land, separated families, divided property and made what used to be a short walk to school turn into an expensive nightmare voyage running the gauntlet of checkpoints, etc. I could have said there were things that even apartheid South Africa had not done, for example collective punishment.

I have not gone that route. No, I have chosen a different approach. My address is really a cri de Coeur, a cry of anguish from the heart, an impassioned plea to my spiritual relatives, the offspring of Abraham like me – please hear the call, the noble call of your scriptures, of our scriptures, to be with the God of the Exodus who took the side of a bunch of slaves against the powerful Pharaoh, be on the side of the God who intervened through His prophet Elijah on behalf of Naboth, hear the plea of your scriptures and stand with the God who intervened through his prophet Nathan on behalf of Uriah against King David. Be on the side of the God who revealed a soft spot in his heart for the widow, the orphan and the alien, be on the side of the God whose “Spirit sends us out to preach good news to the poor.” Don’t be found fighting against the God, your God, our God who hears the cry of the oppressed, who sees their anguish and who will always come down to deliver them. Be not opposed to the God whose Spirit when it anoints you makes you concerned for the poor. This is your calling . If you disobey that calling, if you do not heed it, then as sure as anything one day you will come a cropper. You will probably not succumb to an outside assault militarily. With the unquestioning support of the USA you are probably impregnable. But you who are called are they who are asked to deal with the oppressed, the weak the despised compassionately, caringly, remembering what happened to you in Egypt and much more recently in Germany. Remember and act appropriately. If you reject your calling you may survive for a long time, but you will find it is all corrosive inside and one day you will implode.

A recent report by a clinical psychologist Nufan Yishai Katrim at the Hebrew University speaks of how Israeli soldiers were gratuitously cruel and carried out acts of brutality to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. When you uphold an unjust dispensation it corrodes your humanity. In South Africa a former Cabinet Minister showed this. When told of the death of Steve Biko in detention, he said it left him cold.

Thanks be to God for the many, many Jews who know what their divine calling is and who want the Israeli Government to live it out. We believe in a two state solution – of two sovereign, viable states each with contiguous borders guaranteed as secure by the international community. We condemn acts of terrorism by whoever they are committed. The suicide bomber has to be condemned for targeting innocent civilians. But equally must the Israelis be condemned for their acts of indiscriminate reprisal. We say please learn at least one positive lesson from apartheid South Africa. Under Mr F W de Klerk who must be commended for his outstanding courage, they decided to negotiate, not with those they liked but with their sworn enemy and they found the security that had eluded them for so long and that had cost so much suffering and blood. It came not from the barrel of a gun. No, it came when the legitimate aspirations and human rights of all were recognised and respected. That was thirteen years ago and the peace is still holding. Many had predicted that South Africa would be overwhelmed buy a catastrophic racial blood bath. It did not happen. It did not happen because they negotiated in good faith with their enemies.

Somebody has said if something happened once then clearly it is something possible. It happened in South Africa, why not in the Middle East?

The world needs the Jews, Jews who are faithful to their vocation that has meant so much for the world’s morality, of its sense of what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, what is just and unjust, what is oppressive and what sets people free. Jews are indispensable for a good compassionate, just and caring world.

And so are Palestinians.

The Paradigm Shift Shifts into a Higher Gear

"Nothing is so unworthy of a civilised nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct."
-- Die Weisse Rose (The White Rose), from the first leaflet

Opposition to U.S./Israeli neoconservative warmaking, slaughter, and profiteering the Middle East is growing in every state, city, and community across the nation. It is growing, too, among the members of every political party and persuasion and every religious group: liberals, progressives, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Native American religionists, and non-believers as well. What we are witnessing may be the beginning a paradigm shift of historic proportions. There is certainly a more general recognition and appreciation of, and a desire for the practical application of, the ethic of reciprocity in human affairs. The change has been a long time coming. Two thousand years ago, Jesus promised that the meek would inherit the earth. "No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought," wrote philosopher John Stuart Mill well over 100 years ago. More recently, the late Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychologist Carl Jung said, "One thing is sure. A great change of our psychological attitude is imminent. That is certain."

A confluence of distrubing developments has grasped the attention of vast numbers of people around the globe and persuaded public opinion of the necessity of significant cultural adjustments. Alarming evidence of an array of truly daunting problems is everywhere seen: global warming and changes in weather patterns; environmental pollution, ecosystem degradation, and the attendant negative effects on plant and animal life; oil shortages, rising energy prices, and a developing energy crisis; inequitable, unstable, and unsustainable economic systems; overpopulation, over-crowding, food and water shortages; a return to Cold-War-era weapon systems proliferation with the associated risks and political tensions; and dangerous deterioration in the areas of interfaith and international relations. In short, we are confronted by the most complex and challenging set of difficulties human civilization has ever faced, leading to the realization that these problems represent a serious threat to the uninterrupted progress of human civilization, and a growing recognition that these are shared, complex, and interconnected problems that humanity can hope to find solutions to, and survive without unimaginably catastrophic loss of life, only through our cooperative and concerted efforts.

"We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people," observed François Le Rochefoucauld more than two centuries ago, but today, for the first time in history, humanity has overarching shared interests and common goals of undeniable importance. Mankind also possesses well-nigh instantaneous communications systems that span the globe. Too often, those commnications systems are used for crude and deceptive political and commercial purposes, programming that instills fear, desensitizes, and dehumanizes vast numbers of people, while stereotyping certain groups. Among the audiences most vulnerable to manipulation and social destabilization are our children. Employed responsibly, those same communications systems could facilitate re-humanization processes that reconnect people and knit together various groups, peoples, nations, and cultures by educating us about important issues, informing us about our shared interests and common goals, and assisting us in focusing on universal values--issues, interests, goals, and values that can no longer be ignored, that clearly take precedence over all petty partisan and sectarian concerns. If ever the time was ripe for a spiritual awakening across the traditional boundaries that have long divided humanity, this is it.

Surely our world is now truly quivering on the brink of one of its most amazing and enthralling epochs of social adjustment, moral quickening, and spiritual enlightenment. And our purported leaders' answer to all of this? Can you believe it? Bush and Cheney offer only a discredited scheme for world domination and more questionable intelligence cooked up in a cracked pot, in conjunction with a well-organized campaign of hateful propaganda and threats of yet another ill-conceived, illegal, and unnecessary war, this time against Israel's enemy, Iran, and perhaps with nuclear weapons, coupled with a deal to give Israel $30 billions worth of U.S. weapons and military hardware and plans to give billions more in military aid to other Middle East governments. Which is to say that official Washington is presenting irrefutable evidence of the utter and complete intellectual, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy of the Bush administration and the Israeli-centric U.S. foreign policy establishment. "They who defend war must defend the dispositions that lead to war, and these are clean against the Gospel," wrote Desiderius Erasmus some 500 years ago. His words ring true today.

Will Americans rise to the challenge and lead change by thwarting the neoconservative cabal's plans for war against Iran? Or, must our country suffer yet greater disgrace and dishonor on the world stage for the sake of the arrogance, greed, and vanity of leaders who have embraced the tyrannical and most destructive uses of power? Will we stand idly by as the Middle East is convulsed by wider war and political upheaval, as more hundreds of thousands die needlessly, their bodies bloodied, battered, and broken by America's already overstretched war machine? Must the economy of our nation and the world collapse in a shambles before the paradigm shift shifts into a higher gear, as, sooner or later, it will? Because so many of our so-called leaders have failed the great test of idealism, the answers to these questions are turning out to be up to ordinary people from all walks of life, people who are committed to the traditional American ideals of equality, justice, and fair play, peacemakers who are joining with their friends and neighbors to shoulder the burdens of civic responsibility in support of domestic and foreign policies based on human rights and the principles of equal treatment under the law and self-determination.

Thus we have before us both the challenge, and the opportunity, of the age.

"Tis true that we are in great danger;
The greater therefore should our courage be."
-- William Shakespeare

Shetterly: The Language of Dead Bodies

The Language of Dead Bodies
by Robert Shetterly

everywhere instead of a name there is a lie…
-W. S. Merwin

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light …
- Mary Oliver

I’ve been cutting trees. The woods on the north side of my house is thick with gray trunks of dead fir and spruce. Neither old nor particularly large, these trees have been dead and dying for some time, killed by acid rain or spruce bud worm or something complex and harder to diagnose. Besides being aesthetically unappealing, they are a fire hazard. Some are still standing. Many have blown over making walking in the woods very difficult — like traversing a giant’s game of pick-up-sticks. With my chain saw I topple the standing trees, then cut everything into moveable pieces, and carry and drag the logs and branches back further into the woods, pile them up, building sanctuary for the red squirrels and deer mice, refuge for the winter wren. What’s left is an open woods with a few healthy oaks, tamaracks, and maples.

It’s hard, sweaty work — especially for an aging guy like myself. Some of the logs are old and dry, nearly as light as the paper they might have been made into. Others are dense and heavy. But the work is not so hard or all-engaging that I stop ruminating. Yesterday, as I picked up each log, cradled it in my arms against my chest, and marched with it back into the woods, I was thinking about other things that I have embraced like that, or things that I might have. Memory and imagination are often stimulated by such a simple gesture.

I remembered times, returning late at night from trips, when my children had fallen fast asleep in the back of the car, and I carried them, cradled against my chest, into the house and put them to bed, pulling off their sneakers and pulling up the covers. Holding the logs against my chest, I also imagined they were artillery shells, that I was about to slam them into the breach of a cannon whose explosive destination might be homes and schoolyards where children just like mine played. And I imagined that I was in a market in Baghdad in the aftermath of a truck bombing carrying away the broken, burned, dismembered bodies of children. Or, maybe the leg of a man, the arm of a woman. My comfortable, old sweatshirt stained, not with perspiration and sap, but soaked with blood. I thought of the slash piles I was building in the woods as though they were heaps of bodies and body parts in an Iraqi morgue. Here I was, on a beautiful summer day, having the luxury to work in the woods, dripping with grief and anger.

You remember Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal written in 1729 in which he satirically suggests that the problem of poverty and hunger in Ireland could be eradicated by employing the practical expedient of cannibalism — breast-fed infants, even of the poor, being plump, tender and nutritious. Swift even offered recipes. I’m not in a satiric mood, though. Particularly in regard to overfed Americans whose overweening appetite for collateral damage is largely abstract, the un-named, uncounted bodies consumed to clear the way for imperialism. And even if Julia Child had written it, I doubt that there would be much of a market for the Collateral Damage Cookbook. Denial tends to deaden the taste buds. Even Oprah couldn’t sell it.

I’m thinking instead of a real, political utility for all these civilian bodies, especially the children. However, where they would have the most political advantage is the least practicable. Having Tony Snow lay out the Fed-Exed body of a blasted and still bleeding Iraqi girl on the president’s oak desk in the Oval Office every morning is unlikely. Nor is having every senator and congressman’s desk similarly graced anything that could be arranged. Visas, even for the dead, are bound to be tied up in red tape. And these responsible parties could hardly be counted on as sponsors.

But, in deadly seriousness, I would suggest to the Iraqis that after each bombing they lay out their dead — in rows, in jumbled piles — at the gates of the Green Zone. In my imagination I can see parents carrying the remnants of their children cradled against their chests and depositing them, as is, against those impermeable, medieval-like walls. Children bearing the heads and hands of their parents, neighbors the legs of their friends with the shoes still on, sisters their shrapnel lacerated brothers. Slash piles.

Why suffer in private? William Sloane Coffin exhorted his parishioners to “improve the quality of their suffering,” use their suffering to unite with and console others. Why not, when no peaceful or violent appeal to decency, morality, and rationality has any effect, why not use the bodies most contorted by violence for the most un-contorted of moral speech — Stop!

Let the dead speak.

Let the dead bear witness.

Insist that the hobgoblins of the Green Zone handle the fruits of their labor. Let’s see who would dare to come out to clean up this mess. Let the limp dead be battering rams against the implacable lies. Lies are finally no match for reality. And the reality of a sliced open child’s head, its brain covered in blood and flies, its one remaining eye still asking why, can be persuasive, perhaps more persuasive than a senator with a non-binding resolution, more persuasive than the measured duplicity of an imperfectly born-again Colin Powell, more persuasive than a Democrat who wants to keep the war going to run against it in 2008.

I appeal to the Iraqis to lay the bodies of children and loved ones out like a moat, a sacred circle, a noose around those walls. What could be more eloquent?

I know full well that such an idea is grotesque. What parents wouldn’t want to lay to rest a dead child with dignity, respect, and sanctity even if they can’t find all the parts? A little peace, a resting place apart from the obscenity of indiscriminate bombs. A private place to grieve separate from the marketplace of death. Who would want to lay down a mutilated sister at the base of the anonymous and arrogant edifice behind whose walls electricity runs, beer is cold, air conditioners bathe the generals in air as cool as the Rockies, pretty young women jog in red, white, and blue halter tops, pizza has all the toppings, the wages are high, and not a word is ever said anymore about wining hearts and minds. Would I, crazed with anger and grief, abandon my own dead son or daughter at the imperial gates of the Green Zone?

I don’t know. There is grotesque and then there is grotesque. And then there is the grotesque that may stop this monstrosity.

I have a mask from the Ngala tribe in the Congo. It’s large and dark brown. The woman’s features are sketched in with pale white paint. The downcast eyes are weeping white tears down the round cheeks. It’s a “Women sue for Peace” mask. When the men have been fighting too long, the women don the masks. I wonder if it ever worked. You might say it’s the mask that Cindy Sheehan wore in Crawford. Surely it wouldn’t work in Baghdad.

Reverend Coffin said, “Improve the quality of your suffering.” Sometimes only an act born from the most outrageous grief and love, an act that tears your own heart, can actually do that — save the life of a not yet shattered child.

Robert Shetterly lives in Brooksville, Maine
americanswhotellthetruth.org

Amazing Grace: Words Are All We Have

Amazing Grace.

Changing minds, one person at a time.

Words are all we have. Life if Brief. Pass it on.