Siege Mentality

Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Reform Rabbi and Professor of Jewish Theology at Lampeter University who is a prolific writer on Jewish and Palestinian issues, has recently published a new work, The Paradox of Anti-Semitism. His thesis will shock many people, Jew and non-Jew alike because he argues that anti-Semitism has had positive effects which have ‘led to the enrichment of the Jewish heritage’. Anti-Semitism, which he clearly deplores, has caused Judaism to become introspective and this in turn has had the positive consequence of prompting Jews to value and reaffirm their traditions. The paradox he refers to is that without anti-Semitism, Jews may be unable to survive the conditions of the modern world. “Jews need enemies in order to survive”, he says and “in the absence of Jew-hatred, Judaism is undergoing a slow death”. Indeed he asserts that without anti-Semitism Jews may be doomed to extinction.

In an interview published in The Independent on Sunday, Cohn-Sherbok elaborated on this argument. The interviewer records the Professor’s views in the following way. “Historically it was the barriers imposed by anti-Semitism that helped Judaism survive. In the ghetto, Jews studied the Talmud, kept kosher and observed the commandments of the Torah. In earlier times, when the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, it was the institutions that were created because the Jews had no homeland that bound them together”. The problems he identifies are those forms of assimilation in which Jews are accepted and valued, and in taking on the trappings of the host culture, lose contact with those essential observances and beliefs which make a person Jewish. He posits no solutions for this dilemma and indeed suggests there may be no ultimate answer. “If we’re hated we’ll probably continue as we did in previous centuries, and if we’re loved, we may be loved to death”.

Is the fact that many Jews now possess a homeland and are no longer forced to live in the Diaspora one of the causes of the erosion of traditional beliefs and practices? For one of my Israeli friends this was certainly the case. He was fond of saying that when living in his native New York he had constantly to be seen as being Jewish, whereas in Haifa there was no expectation that he be an observant Jew. But leaving the homeland question to one side, is it the case that in order to maintain their cultural, religious and political identity, Israeli Jews need to be hated by the world at large? If this is indeed so, it would go some way to explaining why the Israeli political establishment rejects international criticism of its human rights abuses in its treatment of Palestinians, and its employment of tactics which, while they cannot be described as ‘holocaust’, are certainly ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Friday’s Guardian carried two articles about the Israeli situation. One was news of a poll of attitudes amongst Israeli Jews which has exposed widespread racism. The poll reveals that two-thirds of Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab; half would not allow an Arab into their home; 41% want entertainment facilities to be segregated; 40% say that the state should encourage Arab emigration; 63% consider Arab Israelis as a security and demographic threat; 34% believe Arab culture to be inferior to Jewish culture; and 18% said they experience hatred when hearing Arabic spoken. Commenting on these results Bacha Ouda, director of an academic centre opposed to racism said that in Israel “racism is becoming mainstream” and Taleb-el-Sana, an Arab member of Israel’s parliament said that while anti-Semitism overseas is greeted with a frenzy of Israeli denunciations, there is no will to address home-grown racism. Another Arab politician claimed that racism has moved from the streets into parliament where it is now an acceptable stance. If this endemic racism becomes as is likely, translated into even more separatist and repressive social, economic and political ‘solutions’ we will be confronted with an Israeli variation of apartheid. And perversely, the storm of overseas criticism that this would provoke would, if Cohn-Sherbok’s thesis is true, have the positive outcome of consolidating Jewish cultural and religious identity.

In the political comment section of the same paper, the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft, commenting on last week’s bizarre Israeli raid on a Palestinian prison in Jericho, says that Israeli indifference to outside opinion reflects the ‘endlessly popular’ Israeli song The Whole World is Against Us. His view is that the liberal establishments of the West had a romantic view of the humanitarian and democratic socialist principles upon which the State of Israel was founded, and that this romanticism obscured the fact that the new State was necessarily predicated upon a form of ethnic cleansing which saw in Moshe Dayan’s famous words Jewish villages built in place of Arab villages so that “there is not one single place that did not have a former Arab population”. In other words, we of the West have through our false perceptions and lack of critical awareness have allowed the development of the Israel contra mundum mentality.

Of course the sad side of all this is the disastrous effects in terms of the health of the community, of the souls and of the minds of Israeli citizens. In another recently published book, The People on the Streets: A Writer’s View of Israel, Linda Grant describes a ‘bubble society’ in which life seems normal as long as one continues to live within the bubble. But beyond the bubble lies something else. Israel, she writes is “a society floating on boiling anger, fear, anxiety, post-traumatic shock, aversion, brutality. You saw it in the road rage, in the domestic violence, in the rape, the desire to build walls not just against suicide bombers but your own neighbours . . . Suspicion, fear, exploding psycho-dramas detonating whole families. I would be woken in the night by terrible screams, the raised voices of husbands and wives, the sound of objects smashing against walls, the police sirens. Or on the street, screeching tyres, sickening metal collisions, tirades of fury between drivers”.

She describes a society under siege, a society which is not coping, a society which cannot imagine an accommodation with its Arab citizens, a society which, as Cohn-Sherbok suggests, cannot afford to be accepted and loved without losing both its identity and its life. And that is a tragedy for all humanity.

On Forgiveness

Forgiveness featured large in the media this week. Dear old Emily Bishop, doyen resident of Coronation Street, the UK’s longest running soap opera, had become a misery as she battled with her inability to respond positively to a plea for forgiveness. The gunman who had killed her husband forty years ago, having completed his prison sentence and become, like Emily, a pious Christian, had returned to the Street in search of her forgiveness. As Emily relived traumatic past events, her bitterness began to dominate her life to the extent that she became a virtual recluse. Earnest conversations with her vicar who urged her to forgive fell on deaf ears and compounded her resistance and she abandoned the practice of her faith. There was to be a happy issue out of her affliction when in a face-to-face meeting with her husband’s murderer Emily summoned up from the depths of her alienation the ability to offer a kind of forgiveness. The release for both these deeply troubled spirits was instantly manifest.

I don’t know whether it can be called a case of life imitating art, but television news featured an item about the Revd Julie Nicholson, vicar of a parish in Bristol who has announced her resignation. Julie’s daughter Jenny, a talented musician, was one of the victims of the London bombings on July 7. In the interview, Julie said that she was unable to forgive the man who planted the bomb, and that she daily pronounced his name, Mohammad Sidique Khan, as a reminder of his crime. “I rage that a human being could choose to take another human being’s life”, she said. “I rage that someone should do this in the name of a God. I find that utterly offensive”.

Julie finds it impossible to express forgiveness and says she will leave the matter of forgiveness in God’s hands in whatever follows this life. But her inability to express forgiveness this side of the grave has raised both spiritual and theological dilemmas for her. “It’s very difficult for me to stand behind an altar and lead people in words of peace and reconciliation and forgiveness when I feel very far from that”, she says. Her bishop defended her resignation from parish ministry saying that while Jesus indeed urged his followers to forgive their enemies, Jesus also had hard words for a religious establishment that exhibited hypocrisy and inauthenticity. “People want clergy to be honest rather than hide the truth”, he said as he questioned whether the road to holiness did not in fact imply “being more fully human and honest”.

Julie could be said to have demonstrated great integrity. For years there have been calls for clergy, including bishops, who claim no longer to believe literally in key doctrines of the Church like the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection, to resign their ministries. But this phenomenon of religious doubt has not stopped such people from daily practising the fundamentals of Christianity which give high priority to forgiving one’s enemies, forgiving people their trespasses. This may suggest that in the last analysis Christianity is primarily about the practice of compassion and forgiveness than about orthodoxy of belief. One of the many factors in the decline of religious belief currently is the image the Church projects of being far more concerned about pursuing obscure theological arguments which appear to have no relevance to contemporary life, rather than embodying those practices of human compassion and care which materially address for example, the crisis of world poverty. In resigning her post as vicar, Julie prompts each of us to consider the extent to which, in a religious or indeed secular sense, we are practitioners of what we preach.

Television also this week also brought us a series of three programmes in which Archbishop Desmond Tutu, drawing on the practice of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, hosted meetings between victims and perpetrators of the endemic violence in Northern Ireland. While that sad part of the United Kingdom stands in dire need of a process of this kind, one of its tragedies is that it possesses neither the imagination nor the willpower exhibited by South Africa to initiate a process of forgiveness and reconciliation. Instead it takes an individual from a distant country and the vision of the BBC to create this kind of opportunity for people to communicate with one another. One of the insights that the programme gave me was of the complexity and moral ambiguity of some of these situations, as in the section where a grieving widow confronted her husband’s killer who reiterated an argument frequently heard at the Nuremberg trials, that he was a soldier in an army fighting for Ireland’s freedom, who followed orders to remove nominated targets. I retain as well the image of that widow recoiling from the gesture of reconciliation offered by the paramilitary and fleeing the studio. Above all I have an abiding image of the diminutive prelate treating all participants with compassion and acceptance, listening carefully to their stories and declaring how humbled he was by the whole experience.

Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian columnist, wrote that in the Tutu programmes there appeared to be subtle pressure placed less on the perpetrators to show contrition than on the victims to exercise forgiveness. In Christianity of course both these responses are sought, but Freedland raises the question of the extent to which in contemporary society forgiveness is regarded as a psychological term which, through expressing feelings of empathy or even love towards somebody who has hurt you, one is enabled to move on.

In response, Giles Fraser, Vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Oxford dismissed the idea of loving the person who has harmed you or your family as morally perverse. Feelings of loss and anger cannot coexist with love, he says. Such an understanding of forgiveness is nothing more than “cheap Christian rhetoric”. For Giles Fraser forgiving a person is to vow that you will not retaliate in kind, not take revenge. This is a position I elaborated fifteen years ago in my book Freedom, Justice and Christian Counter-Culture. In the violent milieu of the culture in which Jesus lived, where every act of violence then and largely still today calls for retaliation and vengeance, Jesus’s admonition to ‘turn the other cheek’ makes a radical break with the spiral of retaliatory violence. The foregoing of retaliation is also an act of empowerment as we witnessed in the positive outcomes of non-violence in achievements as different as those of Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King in the USA.

In the Coronation Street saga this is precisely what happened. Emily Bishop’s desire for revenge became her consuming passion and it was only when in a very dramatic scene she renounced revenge that she became free, and the gunman experienced forgiveness. They parted not as friends, nor with any commitment to ever meet again but as two human beings now able to live with themselves. I hope that the Revd Julie Nicholson watched that episode, and read Giles Fraser’s words in the paper, for both will help her appreciate that Christian forgiveness lies not in being forced to love the person who has wrecked your life, but in determining that you will never yourself retaliate to seek revenge or to respond violently towards another.

Seeds of the Earth

My father was a great gardener who liked to keep the family supplied with fresh vegetables. Some thirty years ago, he ran into a problem. For many years he had grown a variety of runner beans which he reckoned to be the best. He harvested a few beans for seed each season, but this particular year he needed some extra seeds. When he tried to purchase them was told that they had been withdrawn from the market. Upon investigation he discovered that a number of ‘traditional’ varieties were no longer available through the seed merchants, who instead encouraged people to buy their new hybrid varieties, which were designed to produce well but if harvested, the harvested were sterile. From then on my father harvested plenty of seeds for the next season and I can remember the large purple-and-green mottled beans lying in a tray in our basement awaiting their spring planting.

My father had stumbled upon the early days of a project through which multinational companies would exert ever greater control over the ownership of the genetic base of seeds, would see many traditional varieties disappear, and remains with us today as the use of genetically modified crops. His harvesting of traditional varieties’ seeds and his willingness to share his saved seeds with family and friends gave me an idea.

I was at that time working for an ecumenical church agency which through development education was promoting issues of development, justice and peace. One of our international links was with a joint Roman Catholic and World Council of Churches agency SODEPAX established following the more ecumenical and development conscious encounters which emerged from Vatican II. This jointly staffed agency was prophetic to such an extent that it was far in advance of the thinking of its sponsoring churches, and as the Roman Catholic church retreated back into its traditional conservative mould, it was axed.

In the meantime a number of initiatives sheltered under its umbrella and my agency was happy to launch a project of its own. We had become aware that many farmers were becoming concerned about the unavailability of traditional seeds and the promotion of hybrid varieties. Then we came across a project which was launched in Canada. Calling itself Seeds of the Earth, it encouraged people to establish seed banks in which traditional varieties could be stored so that their genetic base was not forever lost. Amongst the alarming statistics they spoke about was the fact that of more than 300 varieties of corn that grew naturally around the earth, less than ten had survived into the mid nineteen-seventies.

So under the SODEPAX banner we launched a Seeds of the Earth campaign in New Zealand. I travelled to towns in the country’s farming heartlands amazed by the number of farmers who turned up to public meetings to discuss the issue. Many of them were already saving traditional seeds so required no convincing. I can’t say whether any community seed banks were established as a result of our work, but certainly public awareness of the situation was raised, and individuals took action appropriate to their circumstances. There were many testimonies to what was occurring in the industry shared at our meetings. I particularly recall a tomato grower describing how he was tied into one particular company from which he purchased his hybrid seed stock, the fertilizer to ensure strong growth, the sprays required to combat pests and blight, as well as the spray which turns green tomatoes red so that they can be ‘ripened’ overnight in order to meet market demands. And that company is one of the major oil companies which continues today to post some of the biggest profits of any multinational enterprise.

I was reminded of this small initiative when I read in this week’s news that British Government ministers are suggesting that the international agreement banning the most controversial of genetically modified crops be scrapped, and that crops be assessed on a case-by-case basis. The technology has become more complex and the problem more acute since our project in New Zealand, but still at its base lies the determination of large companies to maximise their profits. Today the discussion focuses on two kinds of technology. One is ‘terminator technology’ developed by the US Department of Agriculture in partnership with a seed company, which sterilises seeds so that they cannot be harvested and re-grown. Before being offered for sale the seeds are treated with a chemical which activates a gene to germinate normally first time around, but which subsequently prevents seeds of that crop from germinating. Then there is ‘traitor technology’ concerned with the trait of a plant in which the genes governing traits like germination and growth can only be activated when sprayed by a chemical which is of course, sold separately.

Environmentalists argue that through cross pollination, the ‘sterility’ of genetically modified seeds can easily spread to plants and crops which have not been subject to modification, thus destroying even more natural varieties while at the same time of course increasing the control of biotechnic companies over the seed industry. Now there is pressure orchestrated by the USA and involving Australia, New Zealand and Canada which are seen as pro-GM crop nations, to lift the moratorium imposed under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The Seeds of the Earth campaigns in Canada and New Zealand appear to have had no lasting impact upon government thinking.

While GM technology may suit the aspirations of these and other developed nations, if it becomes standard practice, it would have a disastrous effect on Third World farming and inevitably lead to increased starvation. One and a quarter billion poor farmers who rely on saving a portion of their crop for next season’s seed, would have to buy new seeds every year from biotech companies. Michael Meacher, the former Minister for the Environment in the UK who largely brokered the present UN Convention, said “For the first time in the history of the world, farmers would be stopped from using their own seeds”.

I read recently of a GM development which is destined to have a huge effect upon coffee producing countries like Kenya. A coffee bean has been modified so that the crop is of a uniform size and ripens simultaneously. This means that the crop can be totally harvested at one time, rather than picked over by workers over the course of the ripening season. Secondly, the crop can be mechanically harvested which makes the pickers redundant. That means greater profits for the biotech companies, the growers and the processors, but loss of jobs, incomes and dignity for a huge number of the world’s poor who already barely manage to survive.