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Mercy Global Concern - 2003
International Conference: Washington DC, June 1-4, 2003
Many of us are involved in social change movements like the women's movement,
the environmental movement, the movement for economic justice, the civil rights
movement, to name just a few, have greatly admired the energy, courage and moral
commitment of the people we have worked with. We have rejoiced in the significant
victories that these movements have won.
At the International Teach-In to Congress Conference held recently in Washington,
DC, the Tikkun Community who hosted the conference called on participants to
embrace both the outer transformation needed to achieve social justice, ecological
sanity, and world peace, and the inner healing needed to foster loving relationships,
a generous attitude toward the world and toward others unimpeded by the distortions
of our egos, a habit of generosity and trust, and the ability to respond to
the grandeur of creation with awe, wonder and radical amazement.
The Tikkun community is an international network of people working as allies
to advance global consciousness, who understand that, our own personal well-being
and the well-being of our country depends on the well-being of everyone on this
planet. Tikkun, is a Hebrew word which means healing and transformation. The
human race is bursting with the need for a global ethos of solidarity, and recognition
of our mutual interdependence. Safety and security for one is impossible without
safety and security for all. Our individual and societal well-being depends
upon and is intrinsically linked to the well-being of everyone else on the planet.
Once we recognize that we are all interdependent and that our well-being depends
on the well-being of everyone else, we realize that the human race can no longer
tolerate tribalism, national chauvinism, economic injustice, and the irresponsible
use of the world's resources. Developing global and bio-regional planning to
ensure preservation of resources and protection of air and water, fostering
a new ethos of voluntary simplicity and reduction of consumption (particularly
by those in the advance industrial societies who have previously consumed a
disproportionate amount of the world's resources), promoting economic justice
and emergency measure to reverse global warming and other immediate threats
to the environment - these become the central manifestations of a new global
consciousness based on a recognition of the equal sanctity of every human being
and of our communal task to act as stewards for the world we live in.
Peace for Israel and Palestine
The conference then focused on the current Road Map with a question and answer
session:
- What is 'The Road Map'?
The Road Map presented by President Bush asks the parties to take a series
of steps that both sides will find it difficult to do; yet it provides no
clear vision of what the final outcome will be. Instead, at the end of the
road map is not a destination, but a negotiation about what the destination
should be. The Road Map will not empower moderate Palestinians, because when
they approach the extremists to say, " Stop the violence and you will get....
negotiations after three years" they will have nothing convincing or enticing
to offer. Conversely, Israeli moderates will not be able to say to their own
population: "If we give up some of the settlements now, we will get the following
in the long run" because there is no clear vision of what the long run will
be. So the Road Map puts the cart before the horse: It needs to start with
a clear vision of where things should end up, and then it can motivate people
to take steps in that direction. The Tikkun's Community Resolution for Peace
provides a clear vision of where things should things move and then it can
motivate people to move in that direction. It conditions those steps towards
peace on the elimination of all violence. This gives tremendous power to the
extremists who wish to stop the peace process - all they need is to get a
few suicide bombers in place, and the whole process gets derailed. As a result,
instead of rewarding good behavior, and intentions of the majority of the
population, the Road Map, following in a pattern that has been part of Israeli
policy for along time, rewards the extremists and gives them a positive incentive
to do more acts of violence.
- Isn't it Presumptuous and arrogant of the United States and the "quartet"
to offer a final solution - Shouldn't that emerge from the people of the region?
The Resolution for the Road Map derives from the negotiations at Taba
between Israelis and Palestinians and embodies the positions upon which both
sides agreed. At the moment we have a situation where for the past three years
we have had 'tit for tat' acts of aggression and it is therefore the responsibility
of the International community to step in, stop the fight, separate the two
sides, and then take all necessary steps to create a solution that is fair
to both sides. If, on the other hand, we "leave it to the parties involved"
to work things out, the radical asymmetry in power between the occupiers and
the occupied will guarantee that Israel will seek to impose conditions that
are unacceptable to the Palestinian people, and so the occupation will continue.
If we want to end this conflict, we in the rest of the world will have to
play a much more active and forceful part.
- Why should people in the rest of the world have any right to shape what
happens in Israel/Palestine?
Israel was created by a vote of the United Nations, and as an act of affirmative
action, which imposed on the Palestinian People a refuge for world Jewry with
the principle of " right of return" for Jews that was not granted non-Jews.
Creating Israel as a state for a particular ethnic/religious group, the UN
participated in a situation which had led to dispossession of hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians, and there subsequent families now number over 3
million people, many of them living in the worst conditions that exist on
this planet. The peoples of this world have a right and an obligation to rectify
the unjust consequences of their previous acts by creating a Palestinian state
that encompasses almost all of the West bank and Gaza.
Deirdre Mullan RSM
Washington DC June 2003
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