Sisters, why do you seem so silent in the face of possible genocide? Why has there been no collective and resounding "No!" by women officials to the policies of our government that have paved the way for the horrific and nearly daily dying of innocent people in the Middle East? What will be our response to historians fifty years from now when they ask: "What difference has it made to the quest for world peace that women have served in the United States Congress?"

It is still not too late to acknowledge and help reverse the dangerous trends that have brought us to this place. While I could name a dozen, I shall concentrate on three that have undermined our values, defeated our stated goals and threatened our standing with friends and adversaries alike.

1. Stubborn pursuit of policy that has produced the opposite results of our unwavering (and admirable) goal to protect Israel from aggression by its neighbors. We have poured billions into the defense of Israel over the past fifty years. But does any Israeli alive today truly feel safe? Respected? Just think if we had done the following in the past generation:
* diverted ten percent (or even one percent) of our billions of dollars of military aid to Israel into the economy of the West Bank and Gaza instead,
* insisted that Israel respect the some 50 United Nations resolutions on Israel and the Palestinians as clearly as we insisted on Israel's right to exist as a sovereign nation,
* worked to create a two state just solution,
* reduced military aid to Israel and underwritten more joint projects with the Israelis, Palestinians, and citizens of moderate Arab states,
* supported the presence of international observers in the region.
This would have produced a different outcome from the grim scenarios that journalists and experts offer on depressing talk shows today. Moreover, these options are not simply the "advantages of hindsight" but possibilities that my church and other denominations in the U.S. have urged our government to consider within the past ten years, but to no avail. Women in Congress could insist that we adopt these policies today. The future does not have to be like the past.

2. Inability to see and tell the truth when it threatens our perceived self interest or undermines our self-image which contributes, as a result, to media distortion: our media are becoming less perceptive, independent, critical and fair. The daily reporting of the current crisis -- while apparently even-handed in its alternating coverage of Israel and the Palestinians -- rarely is truly fair. The word "terrorist" repeatedly refers to Palestinians who may or may not kill Israelis. The state of Israel has engaged in "state terrorism" for decades and killed hundreds of civilians but we rarely hear it so described since it is simply engaged in "national defense." The history of the defiance of Israel, (the unlawful expansion of settlements and military occupation -- the roots of Palestinian rage), is seldom retold. Instead, when a young Palestinian woman blows up a young Israeli woman along with herself, a Newsweek journalist suggests that they could have been friends in another time and place. "But the intifada cast themselves as adversaries." The cause of this tragic loss of two young lives is attributed to the Palestinians and not to decades of punitive actions by the state of Israel (bulldozing of houses, border harassment, appropriation of land, roadblocks, unlawful detention, and human rights violations.) Because the camera does not lie, Israel is often seen as an oppressive and even vengeful force. But it is rarely -- in the comments of journalists -- the instigator. It does what it has to do. Sharon recently authorized house to house searches and the wanton destruction of lives and property in one Palestinian town after another. President Bush (clearly not happy with this willful undermining of peace efforts by such inflammatory acts of violence) nevertheless responded on the evening news as follows: "This was not helpful." Not helpful?! Arafat, on the other hand, is ever the wily, deceitful, dangerous epitome of evil who can do no right.

3. Resistance to imaginative solutions and resolute reliance on old flawed assumptions, frameworks, and scenarios, even when they fail. Along with this failure to dare to think differently, is our limited knowledge of and access to people who genuinely want peace by nonviolent means in both Israel and Palestine. (This ignorance of the power and efficacy of nonviolence has lethal results.) If you can name three outstanding people who are respected and known in both Palestine and Israel for their commitment to achieving an enduring and just peace by nonviolent means, you know six people that most people in this country have never heard of. But they exist. (And you may have even met many times that number.) Couldn't such persons be convened along with widely respected European and Arab counterparts as well as UN personnel whose fairness is indisputable? Couldn't such people create new possibilities... new energy... new relationships not tortured by bitter and extremely humiliating personal memories?

Whatever happens in the coming weeks, couldn't the women in Congress co-initiate a series of Women to Women gatherings out of which might come common grieving, healing, new relations, and perhaps, in time, common income-producing efforts and more stable infrastructures as well as art, music and drama? At such encounters life itself would be the first priority. More than once in recent years, when women genuinely committed to peace by peaceful means have been added to the mix in negotiations, intractable impasses have been overcome.

On my two visits to the Holy Land within the past ten years, I came face to face with the fears of the Israelis and the near despair of the Palestinians. Both seemed under siege. One guide asked why the Palestinians were a forgotten people. Why did they count for so little? Why weren't Christian people, in particular, dismayed by the steady exodus of the faithful from a land so central to their faith or alarmed by the palpable and corrosive tensions they sensed as they moved between the two lands? I couldn't give him a satisfactory explanation, but I do know that the churches here and in the Occupied Territories continue to pass resolutions, offer proposals, send letters to Congress, the State Department and the President, visit all parties in the region, school themselves in nonviolence and create alternatives to the course our nation has chosen. (See below.)

We in the communities of faith continue to petition you even as we pray and attempt to sustain those who suffer hunger, homelessness, grief, hatred, and the threat of death in the region... Even as we gather in the streets these days to protest the failed policies of our government. Please speak out. Please "choose life" so that both peoples in that tormented land and their descendants might live.

Sincerely,

Jean Martensen, 14008 Parkland Drive, Rockville, Maryland 20853

A very small sample of organizations who have issued recent statements:

Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists,
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America,
Fellowship of Reconciliation,
National Council of Churches, World Council of Churches, Churches for a Middle East Peace, Members of English-Speaking Christian Communities in the Holy Land,
(over a hundred signatories) An Open Letter to US Secretary of State General Colin Powell,
Tikkun Community