If the notions expressed in this presentation seem favorable, the reader is encouraged to pass copies on to others. Contacting me with reactions either favorable, unfavorable or other kinds of thoughts is also encouraged.

My wife and I will be going back to the Middle East more or less indefinitely, because of what our hostage ordeal there back in 1984 taught us. The lesson in turn triggered in us an ardent conviction about what we call "the futility of violence." Not just the futility of the violence of the so-called bad guys, but the futility of the violence of the so-called good guys too.

We view the violence that our government has helped to perpetrate in the Middle East as a terrible metaphor for all the violent strife everywhere. That's because, the Middle East, also known (one could claim oxymoronically) as the Holy Land, is the place where all three monotheistic faiths were born. Moreover it is the place where the concept of community first began many thousands of years ago, and where tragically for us all where it also first began to become unraveled almost as soon as it got going in selfish, ambitious, plundering, coercive deadly violence.

So it was a shock for us to encounter -- last summer -- the terrible depression into which many admirable longtime nonviolent peace seeking Christian and Muslim Palestinian friends, who along with their in-the-minority Jewish colleagues inside and outside Israel, seem to have fallen. Even Sis, after years of teaching alternatives to violence to American children, in a conversation in East Jerusalem with World Vision International's Jerusalem representative felt compelled to ask, "Am I asking children to commit suicide, by turning the other cheek?"

Well, of course, Palestinian young people are committing suicide but not by turning the other cheek. Official martyrdom for these tragically very young human guided missiles has become institutionalized. Families of these desperate young people are receiving public honors and pensions.

But if this turn of events seems fanatically bizarre, is it really any more bizarre than the honors and pensions Israel's intensely militarized society bestows on its own young people for their terms of dehumanizing military service? And, by the way, many of them are now refusing to carry out their martial obligations if it means duty in the occupied territories. They are refusing -- and risking jail by doing so -- because they recognize that what they are involved in is not defense but a kind of confiscatory aggression.

What is additionally bizarre is how Israel seconded by the United States is vehemently reacting to the same kind of violently aggressive desperate resistance that has been significantly similar in years past to the struggle of Jews to be in control of their own destinies. For instance, desperate suicidal revolt is precisely what the cornered Jewish remnant in the Warsaw ghetto launched during the Nazi's final drive to exterminate it during World War II.

And, of course, acts of suicidal desperation are an honored component of ancient Jewish lore too. For instance, there was the mass murder of the cornered women and children atop Masada by their Jewish Zealot husbands and fathers during the final desperate days of their revolt against Rome. Then, as we know, in an act of final desperate defiance, the men committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner. One wonders what those Jewish heroes promised their loved ones with respect to an afterlife as they slit their wives and children's throats.

Clearly, in the face of this kind of conceptual double standard, if you are a Palestinian, you can't win for losing.

Nevertheless Palestinians -- Christian and Muslim -- along with their courageous paddling against the tide Jewish colleagues with good reason are expressing the same bewilderment with respect to the U. S. position. For too long it has, in my opinion, been comparable to Saul of Tarsus holding the coats of those who murdered St. Stephan. How Americans can watch Palestine -- Christian and Muslim -- twist slowly slowly in the wind of Israeli attempts to perpetuate, what even New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has described as an "insane land grab," not to mention the U. S. decades long complicity with the process, remains a source of anxious confusion. But having said that, of course, we can't excuse the rationalizations murderous Palestinian extremists are using to justify turning their young into smart bombs.

Nevertheless, there is another horrendous story about persecution that needs to be repeated now in order to assure you that Sis and I do recognize the legitimate antecedents to the current inappropriate mutual carnage. Note, I said legitimate antecedents. But they must not be taken in any sense as an apologetic for the violence by either side.

And the story is this: By the end of the 19th century there was a logical, credible, and critically necessary motive for the movement that resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel in the Arab Middle East fifty years later. The aim was to establish a homeland for severely oppressed Jews who ideally would be secure forever from almost unremitting persecution and extermination in one part of Europe or another.

It is a historic fact that long before the 19th century, deadly persecution of Jews all over Europe had already become a demonic game that only Christians played -- not Islam. While Jews were the favorite whipping boys and girls of European Christianity throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, they were an unthreatened minority in the Middle East and also Moorish Spain -- the Spain before the subsequent brutalities of Ferdinand, Isabella and the Inquisition.

Very often when I give this talk, people will ask, but isn't there something called the Balfour Declaration dating back to 1917 that gives the Jews the right to that land? Well my answer to that question is this. Yes, there is something called the Balfour Declaration; but it conveyed no right; it simply stated British policy as to the need for Jews to be able to live there. Specifically the November 1917 document asserted that the British government "view[ed] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People..." In the years of violence that have followed, tough minded and hard line Israelis have invoked those words as a kind of enabling rationale for their contemporary 'Iron fist' approach to curbing stubborn Palestinian -- Christian and Muslim -- resistance to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. But a more complete reading of the Balfour Declaration -- in fact just reading the last half of the sentence I just read to you -- demonstrates a habitual distortion of its intent. That is because even though the first half of the sentence did say that the British government "view[ed] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People," the last half of that sentence went on to say "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

Nevertheless, in spite of the admonition, Israel became an exclusivist Jewish state thirty one years later because that is what was authorized by a majority of states in the United Nations General Assembly in 1947: justified in part by an old old myth propounded by Zionism's founding fathers that the desired territory was a land without a people waiting for a people without a land.

TO MAPS

Time after time, Palestinians -- Christians and Muslim -- and their Israeli colleagues ask Sis and me why our government is treating Palestinian Arabs -- Christian and Muslim -- like it has our own Native Americans and African Americans in the past. I have to tell them, that the only honest answer is: because that's what America does.

I think another crucial reason, why, is because of the curious way millions of Americans look at the Bible. I'm not talking about American Jews, because there are only about five or six million of them. I'm talking about certain American Christians -- perhaps as many as seventy million of them -- who comprise a powerful partnering neotheopolitical ideology. Here's what I mean.

Many Christians and many of their militant Zionist Jewish allies will tell you that God promised the Holy Land to the ancient Hebrews -- unconditionally -- no strings attached. So no matter what Jewish Israelis do these day in order to hang on to the occupied territories, it is O. K. -- including being mean as hell to the Palestinians -- Christian and Muslims. They feel it is O. K. because as far as God is concerned he doesn't renege on a promise.

However, the theology connected with the so-called promise of the land and the perquisites of choseness have always had to do with conduct -- with behavior -- not real estate. So the loss of divine approval, which is the consequence of inappropriate too often violent conduct, is what the Promised Land covenants are all about and still stand for.

Now let's jump ahead at least a thousand years to the time of the Gospels and the Last Supper. The New Testament never says that Jesus talked about redeeming the land of Israel for his people. In fact he forever depoliticized the great Passover commemoration for his followers from a celebration of the liberation of his Jewish forbears from the physical bondage of Egypt, and the advent of a distinctive national identity. And he did it by turning some of the Passover feast's most familiar symbols (bread and wine) to startling new uses.

The first words he is said to have used in his charge to the disciples are, "Do this in remembrance of me." And they are 180 degrees out from the customary answer to the words traditionally used to begin the Jewish Passover celebration, "Why do we remember this night?" He was telling his followers to not remember the night as a symbol of the liberation of their people as promised in the old covenant. Instead he wanted them to remember it as an event symbolizing his new covenant: God's promise through him of a kind of personal release for them forever if they recognized that their faith and how to live it would be far more important than being a citizen of a particular country.

Certain Christians who sidestep Gospel issues in the way I have just described also use selectively chosen ancient pre-and post-Gospel prophecy and events to leverage a violent climax to history, which they believe will end favorably for them but unfavorably for everyone else. Last judgment exclusivity is an exciting thought for the raptured-elect: by that I mean those Christians who fervently believe in an extrapolated Book of Revelation concept -- which promises a sudden quick ascent into heaven -- even though the word rapture does not appear anywhere in Scripture.

But for that to happen, according to this neotheopolitical ideology, Jews must be ruling the territory that comprised Biblical Palestine. They need to be there so that they like almost everyone else will be conveniently positioned to die in a final apocalyptic battle on the plains around the ancient city of Megiddo.

Israelis have craftily used this interpretation of New Testament scripture to enlist Christian sympathy and support with incredible success. I say crafty, because Jewish faith documents do not include the book of Revelation. And also because most of Israel's most powerful political leaders are not religious. So it's no skin off those Israeli noses as to how the Book of Revelation predicts they will die, because the book is not the least bit credible to them. Spiritual politics does at times make strange bed fellows.

I'm, almost done, but I must talk about the Holocaust.

The Nazi genocide has become an agonizing issue for Palestinians, because it is an historic fact that it has been used to create a permanent sense of guilt in Christian hearts in the West to the extent that they will overlook the harsh and too often deadly treatment of Palestinians -- Christian and Muslim -- by a series of militant Israeli governments. Now, I personally think that Christianity in general should feel terribly self-conscious about its passivity with respect to the Holocausts, but not at the expense of the Arab world, which had nothing to do with it.

Happily, however, there are many Jews, as I have been reporting, who are refusing to join with Christian Zionists in playing deadly violent games with their scripture and who are passionately condemning the beating of Palestine to an increasingly bloody pulp with a Holocaust club. They do that because they value the humane and anti-violent teachings of the later prophets more than Christian Zionists do.

For their steadfastness these compassionate Jews have been termed "self-hating" by militant Zionist Jews and their Christian Zionist fellow travelers. Many have had their bones broken in the struggle and have served and right now are serving terms in Israeli prisons for their beliefs and humanitarian concerns.

So, what to do? Well, first of all I think we must recognize the signs and forms of hope -- as we have been commanded to do for two millennia -- and then build on them. And the signs and forms are there.

For instance, Sis and I feel it a privilege to have been able to observe close up the physical manifestations of hope in the relentless courageous nonviolent actions day after day of a steadfast phalanx of Israeli and Diaspora Jews who continue to struggle alongside Palestinians -- Christian and Muslim -- in West Banks villages, towns, fields and roads. They are struggling to shield their Arab cousins from the fury of their Jewish brothers and sisters and the strategic indifference of our government and too many Christians especially in the United States.

And we also been blest to have been able to help pass on the message continually going forth daily from the non-violent persecuted alliance of Muslim and Christian Arabs, and their Jewish partners that the reverence for life and freedom -- all life and everyone's freedom -- is alive and well in the Holy Land in those fundamentally decent hearts and minds.

So, I think that job one for us here tonight is to urge our Government to persuade Israel -- not just ask it -- to start living up to its self-styled conceit of being the only democracy in the Middle East instead of living it down. And to start helping Christians who seem to care more about the Old Testament than the New to get with the program. When that happens, Palestinians and Israelis will make short work of the violent extremists in their midst.