16/10/2023
Like most of you, I've been watching the news out of Israel with horror and shock. I've been hesitant to comment as I truthfully haven't had any words to make sense of the horrific tragedy happening before our eyes on our news feeds. That said, I felt it was important to shake myself out of my dismay and share with you some thoughts. Holy Land 360 has always been a pro-peace, pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian and pro-justice organization. Its mission is to create transformational experiences that remove the obstacles of prejudice and fear, facilitate unlikely friendships, and promote peace and justice across borders, walls, and faiths. We just finished our first tour a month ago, and I feel we accomplished much of our mission. Unfortunately, future trips are now in doubt with the new round of unprecedented violence. I believe violence cannot ultimately solve the world's complex problems. No matter how heinous, responding to violence with even more heinous violence never works long-term. It might be a short-term fix, but it never addresses the root causes of injustice, crime, corruption, hate, racism, or oppression. You can't "one-up" your enemy by behaving more violently to solve a conflict. Violence, war, and murder do not fix things long term. In other words, as Father Chacour would say... "You cannot love your neighbor with a hydrogen bomb." History has shown that violence begets violence; hate begets hate. Unfortunately, Hamas and the Israeli government's grotesque violence against one another is nothing new when you look at the patterns of human behavior over the centuries. It happens when humans treat other humans as "other" or less than... like animals. Unfortunately, it is the way of the world we have created and apparently are okay with; at least our leaders are. As I read the news this morning, fears of the war spilling out beyond Gaza are growing as violence increases in the West Bank and northern Israel and as the US and Iran become more involved.
I'm naive, but I believe there is a better way.
This other way has shown its effectiveness over and over again throughout history. It's an understanding that we are all a part of one biological organism called Earth, one race called humanity, and that we are interconnected biologically, emotionally, and spiritually. We need one another. We are a part of one another. We have an innate desire to connect with one another. Another name for this is love. Love is truly the only answer; It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others; it is not self-seeking; it is not easily angered; "it keeps no record of wrongs". Can you imagine a world where our governments, politicians, and leaders followed this biblical directive? Why have we not held them accountable to this? As a solution to our problems, love has been killed, discarded, and overruled over and over again, replaced with violence, hate, and slaughter as the preferred method of fixing things. Yet, despite its many deaths, it keeps resurrecting itself in our collective spirits, like a blossoming flower emerging from the ash pile of despair. Love keeps floating to the surface. Love vainly never gives up!
Today, I'm asking you to consider the way of love. What does that look like? How do we express love and encourage peace against such hatred and violence? It all seems so hopeless, but I believe there are practical things we can do, like...
Regarding this current conflict, contact your elected officials and call on them to enact measures encouraging peace and restraint by all parties and address the ROOT causes of the current violence.
Pray, both individually and corporately, for peace and justice in a land filled with distrust, fear, corruption, and hate on both sides. Pray they would someday see their enemy as their brother or sister.
Give to organizations doing valuable work waging peace instead of hate. As many of you know, Holy Land 360 partners with Bethlehem's non-profit Holy Land Trust. Their commitment to non-violence and unwavering solidarity for justice, equality, love, and freedom is a small flicker of light in the midst of this current darkness. You can give to them here: https://www.nonviolenceinternational.net/donate_hlt
Lastly, make an unlikely friend/s with someone you wouldn't normally interact with, someone from a different ethnic or socio-economic group, faith, or ideology. Find common ground and build on that. This is where the rubber meets the road. The less we see people "not like us" as our brother or sister, the more likely we are to follow the biblical mandate of caring for the stranger, the foreigner, the refugee. (see Matthew 25:35, Hebrews 13:2, Leviticus 19:33-34, Leviticus 19:34, Deuteronomy 10:19, Matthew 25:40, and about 107 other verses)
Peace.
