Realizing God's Dream for the Holy Land

Today I had round two of Thanksgiving celebrations with a group of Mormons living in Ramallah and Jerusalem.

Stuffed!

I think I'll be fasting for the weekend.

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I think that for Thanksgiving, Desmond Tutu's address to the Sabeel Conference this fall in Boston is appropriate for reflection.

Enjoy!

Realizing God's dream for the Holy Land
By Desmond Tutu | October 26, 2007


WHENEVER I am asked if I am optimistic about an end to the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I say that I am not. Optimism requires
clear signs that things are changing - meaningful words and unambiguous
actions that point to real progress. I do not yet hear enough
meaningful words, nor do I yet see enough unambiguous deeds to justify
optimism.

However, that does not mean I am without hope. I am a Christian. I am
constrained by my faith to hope against hope, placing my trust in
things as yet unseen. Hope persists in the face of evidence to the
contrary, undeterred by setbacks and disappointment. Hoping against
hope, then, I do believe that a resolution will be found. It will not
be perfect, but it can be just; and if it is just, it will usher in a
future of peace.

My hope for peace is not amorphous. It has a shape. It is not the shape
of a particular political solution, although there are some political
solutions that I believe to be more just than others.

Neither does my hope take the shape of a particular people, although I
have pleaded tirelessly for international attention to be paid to the
misery of Palestinians, and I have roundly condemned the injustices of
certain Israeli policies that compound that misery. Thus I am often
accused of siding with Palestinians against Israeli Jews, naively
exonerating the one and unfairly demonizing the other.
Nevertheless, I insist that the hope in which I persist is not
reducible to politics or identified with a people. It has a more
encompassing shape. I like to call it "God's dream."

God has a dream for all his children. It is about a day when all people
enjoy fundamental security and live free of fear. It is about a day
when all people have a hospitable land in which to establish a future.
More than anything else, God's dream is about a day when all people are
accorded equal dignity because they are human beings. In God's
beautiful dream, no other reason is required.

God's dream begins when we begin to know each other differently, as
bearers of a common humanity, not as statistics to be counted, problems
to be solved, enemies to be vanquished or animals to be caged. God's
dream begins the moment one adversary looks another in the eye and sees
himself reflected there.

All things become possible when hearts fixed in mutual contempt begin
to grasp a transforming truth; namely, that this person I fear and
despise is not an alien, something less than human. This person is very
much like me, and enjoys and suffers, loves and fears, wonders,
worries, and hopes. Just as I do, this person longs for well-being in a
world of peace.

God's dream begins with this mutual recognition - we are not strangers,
we are kin. It culminates in the defeat of oppression perpetrated in
the name of security, and of violence inflicted in the name of
liberation. God's dream routs the cynicism and despair that once
cleared the path for hate to have its corrosive way with us, and for
ravenous violence to devour everything in sight.

God's dream comes to flower when everyone who claims to be wholly
innocent relinquishes that illusion, when everyone who places absolute
blame on another renounces that lie, and when differing stories are
told at last as one shared story of human aspiration. God's dream ends
in healing and reconciliation. Its finest fruit is human wholeness
flourishing in a moral universe.

In the meanwhile, between the root of human solidarity and the fruit of
human wholeness, there is the hard work of telling the truth.
From my experience in South Africa I know that truth-telling is hard.
It has grave consequences for one's life and reputation. It stretches
one's faith, tests one's capacity to love, and pushes hope to the
limit. At times, the difficulty of this work can make you wonder if
people are right about you, that you are a fool.

No one takes up this work on a do-gooder's whim. It is not a choice.
One feels compelled into it. Neither is it work for a little while, but
rather for a lifetime - and for more than a lifetime. It is a project
bigger than any one life. This long view is a source of encouragement
and perseverance. The knowledge that the work preceded us and will go
on after us is a fountain of deep gladness that no circumstance can
alter.

Nothing, however, diminishes the fear and trembling that accompany
speaking the truth to power in love. An acute awareness of fallibility
is a constant companion in this task, but because nothing is more
important in the current situation than to speak as truthfully as one
can, there can be no shrinking from testifying to what one sees and
hears.

What do I see and hear in the Holy Land? Some people cannot move freely
from one place to another. A wall separates them from their families
and from their incomes. They cannot tend to their gardens at home or to
their lessons at school. They are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints
and unnecessarily beleaguered by capricious applications of
bureaucratic red tape. I grieve for the damage being done daily to
people's souls and bodies. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of
the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa.

I see and hear that ancient olive trees are uprooted. Flocks are cut
off from their pastures and shepherds. The homes of some people are
bulldozed even as new homes for others are illegally constructed on
other people's land. I grieve for the land that suffers such violence,
the marring of its beauty, the loss of its comforts, the despoiling of
its yield. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the bitter days
of uprooting and despoiling in my own country.

I see and hear that young people believe that it is heroic and pious to
kill others by killing themselves. They strap bombs to their torsos to
achieve liberation. They do not know that liberation achieved by
brutality will defraud in the end. I grieve the waste of their lives
and of the lives they take, the loss of personal and communal security
they cause, and the lust for revenge that follows their crimes,
crowding out all reason and restraint. I have to tell the truth: I am
reminded of the explosive anger that inflamed South Africa, too.

Some people are enraged by comparisons between the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict and what happened in South Africa. There are differences
between the two situations, but a comparison need not be exact in every
feature to yield clarity about what is going on. Moreover, for those of
us who lived through the dehumanizing horrors of the apartheid era, the
comparison seems not only apt, it is also necessary. It is necessary if
we are to persevere in our hope that things can change.

Indeed, because of what I experienced in South Africa, I harbor a vast,
unreasoning hope for Israel and the Palestinian territories. South
Africans, after all, had no reason to suppose that the evil system and
the cycles of violence that were sapping the soul of our nation would
ever change. There was nothing special or different about South
Africans to deserve the appearance of the very thing for which we
prayed and worked and suffered so long.

Most South Africans did not believe they would live to see a day of
liberation. They did not believe that their children's children would
see it. They did not believe that such a day even existed, except in
fantasy. But we have seen it. We are living now in the day we longed
for.

It is not a cloudless day. The divine arc that bends toward a truly
just and whole society has not yet stretched fully across my country's
sky like a rainbow of peace. It is not finished, it does not always
live up to its promise, it is not perfect - but it is new. A brand new
thing, like a dream of God, has come about to replace the old story of
mutual hatred and oppression.

I have seen it and heard it, and so to this truth, too, I am compelled
to testify - if it can happen in South Africa, it can happen with the
Israelis and Palestinians. There is not much reason to be optimistic,
but there is every reason to hope.

Desmond Tutu is the former archbishop of Cape Town, chairman of the
South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a Nobel Peace
Prize Laureate.