 Hello, my name is Bob Scheibel. I am the Chair of Main Voices for Palestinian Rights and our organization is a member of CTN 5. The purpose of our organization is to generally educate the public about the struggle that the Palestinians are undertaking to receive their rights under international law. We are very fortunate that we have with us in the studio today Dr. Mark Braverman who came down to give a talk at First Parish UU Church and also to have an afternoon session with local church leaders and members to talk about how the Christian community can be more effectively and constructively involved in the search and the struggle for peace with justice in the Middle East. Mark, I want to welcome you. Thanks, Bob. It's great to be in Portland. Good. You've written two books and I've read both of them. The first one, The Fatal Embrace, I read a couple of years ago and after reading that book said to myself, wow, I've got to get that man to come to Portland and now you're here. And I know about you that you are a Jewish American with family roots, deep family roots in the Holy Land. So I'm interested in knowing what your earlier life was about, your work now quite vigorously on behalf of Justice for Palestinians and I assume you probably weren't born doing that. So what was your earlier life and what brought you to this point? No, for sure I was not born doing that. I was born to a fairly traditional Jewish family in Philadelphia, which is a very strong Jewish community. In 1948, the big year, if you were Jewish, because that was the year that the State of Israel was declared, it was also three years after the end of World War II. So if you're a Jewish kid born into a fairly traditional Jewish environment in those years, you were raised in a very potent combination of traditional Judaism and political Zionism. The State of Israel had just been declared. I was taught that this was the culmination of Jewish history that my people had been redeemed from 2,000 years of suffering and slaughter. The ashes were not cold yet from the ovens of Auschwitz. The genocide that we had experienced was still very, very fresh. It still is. And those two things really meshed together. We were supposed to have this land to protect us. And so at that point really Judaism and Zionism, which is the political ideology that underlies the State of Israel, that Jews need to have a homeland of their own in historic Palestine, that really meshed with Judaism. I think it's important for people to understand that that was not always true before the 40s, before the war, before the establishment of the state. Most of organized Judaism, the denominations like Christian, like being a Presbyterian or Episcopalian or Roman Catholic, the Jewish denominations were faith communities, religious denominations, just like Protestants and Catholics. As opposed to political communities. Yes, not a national people. We talked about the people of Israel, but that was really just like talking about being part of the body of Christ and being a Presbyterian with a history. And most organized Judaism was officially non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. They said, why would we want to be connected with a nationalist, ethnic nationalist movement? We want to be a faith community just like you Protestants. It's not a good idea to mesh religion with nationalism. Jews were politically progressive, liberal, even way left. Lots of Jews were communists. Nationalism was not supposed to be part of our religion. All that changed in the late 40s. To be a Jew meant to believe in the state of Israel as an inextricable part of your identity, your belief system. And if you were not on that train, you were outside of the pale. And all of this because of Hitler and the Holocaust. Is that right? It's because of Hitler and the Nazi Holocaust. It was because of all kinds of geopolitical things that were going on at the time having to do with England and Russia and France and what the West and the United States and what the West wanted to be doing in what they called the Middle East, Western Asia, that quote Arab world. And the idea of Israel as a kind of a Jewish, well white European enclave fit to some extent with some of those plans. But it's not all political. A lot of it has to do with religious belief. The idea that the Jews are separate people different than others who belong in a separate place seems to me like a kind of anti-Semitic idea. But maybe we can talk more about that. That's fairly deeply rooted in Western Christian culture, especially in British culture. And Britain, of course, had the mandate for Palestine. So I think that to favor the Jews and sort of giving away to the Jews what maybe belonged to the Arabs, the indigenous population of the Palestinians who lived there, it didn't seem like such a bad idea to a Western-oriented political reality. So you had brought up firmly in that belief set what brought about a change? Short story. I met this so-called enemy. You know, part of being raised as a Jew and I need to make it clear. And I do so much talking about Christianity and Jesus and his political context and all that. People sort of wonder when was it that I converted to my solo Jew? I am certainly a Jew as part of my identity. And I love being a Jew and I value my culture and my tradition very, very highly. It's an extraordinarily important, rich, invaluable tradition. But like growing up in any tradition and that would include being an American or being a Christian or being a Muslim, being a Buddhist, it has its dark side. Usually having to do with exclusivism and God's with us and not with the others. And Judaism definitely has its dark side. Especially since we feel we have the right to claim so much victimhood and so much suffering. So part of what I was brought up with was a sense of having to know that the rest of the world out there was dangerous, unfriendly and just an inside secret, not really as good as us either. There was that sense of exceptionalism and entitlement. So I grew up with that as well and I learned that I had two enemies. Key, primary enemies. One was German people because of what they had just done to us. And the other was the Arabs as we called them because of what they would do to us if we didn't have Israel. I was brought up to fear those people and to see them as the bad guys. Growing up as an American in those years along with the Commies. I was brought up as a Southern Baptist believing that the Catholics were that way. And if John F. Kennedy were elected president, in fact I gave a speech in my high school civics class about why they should vote for Nixon. This was in North Charleston, South Carolina because if Kennedy was elected the Pope was going to rule America. That was my little nutshell of exclusiveness and the other as enemy. So we all have to, many of us are brought up with that kind of thing and we have to overcome it. It was something in me that always said, you know what, I do not want to base my identity on who the bad guys are and who it is I'm supposed to hate and fear. So when I met the so called enemy, when I met the Palestinians, that's what turned me around. I was ready for it, something in me that always rebelled against the idea that these Arabs were terrible. How did you happen to meet them? You meet some over here? I'm going to interfaith pilgrimage. There are many such that will take people to Israel and Palestine, Israel, Palestine, whatever you want to call it. We can get to the politics of it. There's one state there now, it's called Israel. It owns it all and it's in apartheid state. That's the reality that we've got now. So call it Israel, call it Palestine, call it Israel and the occupied territories. It's hard to find what to call it because there are so many illusions and lies out there about what it really is. It's basically a colonial enterprise and Israel's got it all and there are these enclaves of Palestinians sort of like South Africa under apartheid. Anyway, I went there with an interfaith delegation actually with the Fellowship of Reconciliation. It's not that long ago, back in 2006. We went everywhere and met everybody, Israelis, Arab and Jewish, Palestinians, Muslim and Christian in the West Bank and Gaza. I met these Palestinians and not only were they not my sworn enemy, they were happy to see me. Thank you for coming. And if you've ever tried to refuse Arab hospitality, you know how to start international episodes. Yes, my wife and I have been there three times now in the last four years. So it's ahalan was ahalan, please come into my house, drink my coffee and you do not say no. And now, angry, bitter, sad, puzzled, all of that. Hate, no. Fear, no. Thank you for coming. And I learned the other narrative. I mean, the 1948 narrative that I learned, we called it the War of Independence or the War of Liberation. And it was a war of self-defense. Hordes of Arabs from five countries were swept into the young state to drive the Jews into the sea and they heroically defended themselves. Now, there were hostile Arab armies that did come in, but they were unmatched. They were no match for the well-armed, fairly well-organized Jewish forces. And according to, I'm sure you must have read Ilan Pape's book, The Ethnic Cleansing, and according to that book the Arab regulars actually didn't come in until, what was it, May 14th or 15th or 48th after about a quarter of a million Palestinians had already been driven out of their homes. It was an ethnic cleansing operation and it was something that they had been planning, been green, been planning since the 30s. So there's a whole other narrative. I mean, but the key narrative that we didn't learn, no matter who started what or how many people, I mean, the key piece of the narrative was that this was not a country for a people without a country, which was this old Zionist motto. They were an indigenous population. And for this colonial enterprise called Zionism, that was a problem. What do you do with the fact that there are people there? You lie about the fact that they're even there. You lie about the fact that they actually have a vibrant culture, an economy, agriculture. I was taught that this was a barren desert with a couple of primitive people with camels running around. And you still hear that today. I hear people still making that claim. So I learned that there was is a people, a culture, and that they were driven out to make room for Israel. Now, this presented me with a significant conflict because I was raised on it. And I had lots and lots of family there. I mean, you talked about my family roots. My grandfather was born in Jerusalem around the turn of the 20th century, around 1900. And he emigrated to the United States. I'm a second generation American, but I have huge family there and friends. And an emotional connection to the place. And for me to have that turned upside down and to have that romantic dream in Israel is a beautiful place. And it's a beautiful culture that people started to build there. It's now turned to, I don't want to say the word on the radio, on TV. The dream has turned into a nightmare. It's a very, very troubled Sikh society because compared to South Africa under apartheid, compared to Jim Crow South, where deeply embedded in the culture is racism and fear and hatred and inequality. That's Israel today. I say this with enormous sadness. So my appeal to American society and to the churches in particular, and that's a political strategy. The churches can be quite powerful as they show. They can be with the civil rights movement and with the anti-apartheid movement. My appeal is, you know what you need to do about this kind of a scenario. As soon as you learn facts, which are sort of the reverse of what we've been taught of the Israelis and the Jews as the victims and the Palestinians as these bloodthirsty terrorists. Which also fits into the dominant American narrative. It's a perfect storm. We're very, very ready to believe as Americans that A, there's this dark, evil people out there that worship another God that hate our freedom. And we have this bastion of good white Judeo-Christian democratic folks, and that's called Israel and that's our friend, and they're going to protect us from these terrorists. That's A, and B, you know, that the Bible says so. I mean, there are lots of Christians that believe that, yeah, the Jews need to have Jerusalem because that means Jesus is coming tomorrow. As soon as we get rid of those last non-Jews. So we need to educate Americans about that. We need to understand that it's not in our national interest to be seen as in lockstep with Israel because it makes the rest of the world hate us. Which, I mean, what else is new about American foreign policy? I mean, that's what we always do, but this is probably the worst case. Because we are funding Israel. I mean, Israel is the, Israel is, depending on how you count, Israel is less than 10 million people. It is the largest single recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world, a place of size in New Jersey, with less people than in New Jersey. So, I mean, it's not good. It's not good for me. You know, you mentioned the civil rights in the South. I grew up in the South, and I grew up a racist. Not a horrible racist. In other words, the N-word was just not spoken in my household. We didn't use that word. But we definitely believed in separate but equal. And I never bothered to notice whether or not there really was equal. It was just separate. And we were pretty convinced that those people were less than us. And it wasn't until I went off to college that I discovered I was a racist. And during that period, I began to speak to those around me, and once I started teaching as a graduate assistant, I would talk in my classes. But I never really did anything. I was, I kind of kept my nose in the books. I had to get my PhD, my master's in PhD. And I wasn't about to go down South on Freedom Summer, because I knew how nasty those people were down there. And I was, I wasn't about to do it. When I became aware of this issue, I discovered, my God, there's racism here. And it was part of what has made me become so committed to it. I thought, okay, this racial issue, I'm not going to sit out. I'm going to be active in it. And so it was my history as a racist in the racist South that really has motivated me in large part to work so much on this. Now, you didn't have to move into working with Christian churches, and I know you do a lot with what is called Kairos. Would you explain what Kairos is and then Kairos USA? So Kairos is a Greek word, it's from the New Testament. It's what John the Baptist said when he said, the time is fulfilled. That was the word that was used, Kairos is the time. It's a time when history opens, something new is going to happen. History opens because something revolutionary has to happen because things are so bad, and that was the coming of Jesus. So it's a word that's deeply rooted in Christian lore, in Christian theology. The South Africans picked it up in the mid-80s when the South African churches wrote a prophetic document coming out against the apartheid saying that it was a heresy, and they said that Kairos is the moment of grace and opportunity when God issues a challenge for decisive action. So they use that very word. They use the word Kairos, this is the Kairos, and their document was called The Challenge to the Church, a commentary on the current political situation in South Africa, Kairos, South Africa. That was in 1985. It was a game changer because when the churches turned against the regime, and of course the churches had been collaborating with the regime saying, we can have a kindler, gentler apartheid, we can separate black and white in churches. They said no to that, and that was within seven years the apartheid was over. The Palestinians in 2009, a broad ecumenical group of Palestinian church leaders and activists, Christian Palestinians. They got with the South Africans and said it's time for us to write our own Kairos document, and they came out with it in 2009. You can Google it, find it on the internet. I'm actually not speaking to you, I'm speaking to the audience. That's K-A-I-R-O-S. So if you go to KairosUSA.org, we've got a page in there that shows that whole history of the Kairos documents. Chiefly, the South African, the Palestinian, and then there have been Kairos documents that have come out of other cultures in Asia, the rest of Africa, South America. Again, especially to your point earlier, people who connect with it in terms of their own indigenous contextual struggles. So the Filipinos, the kind of Kairos theology, which is kind of a liberation theology that they're writing, blow your socks off. It's amazing, wonderful stuff, because they know. They know what it means to be colonized. They know what it means to have an indigenous population that is struggling against the colonial power that has taken over their country, their own people. And they're aware of the Palestinians' plight? They are like you. They are attracted to it. They want to connect to it because it helps put them more on their own feet in terms of their own struggle. This was true for the South Africans as well. It's true now for the Brits, and it's true for the Americans. So we started KairosUSA as a response to the Palestinian call. So who in Palestine started it? It wasn't the Palestinian Authority, I'm pretty sure. The Palestinian Authority does not work for the Palestinian people, as you know. The Palestinian Authority is kind of like Vichy France. They were not working for the French. You know who they were working for. They were working for the occupier. The Palestinian Authority was set up by Israel, the United States, and the Western Powers in 1993 as part of what was supposed to be an agreement that would lead to the establishment of the Palestinian State. That was Oslo because it was written in Oslo, Norway. No, PA is not working for the Palestinian people. These are the churches that are stepping out prophetically saying, because we are Christians, we are by our faith required to resist tyranny and evil, the occupation of our land, the ethnic cleansing and oppression of our people is a tyranny, it is evil. We must resist it non-violently, reaching out in love, as in Christian love, to our enemy, to our occupier, saying we will live together with you. You must stop doing this to us. You know, it's interesting because you're talking about the Christians there, and some people would think, how do Christians get over there? I know. And just, I will confess that a few years ago, a Palestinian woman was visiting in our home. She was a roommate of our daughter who was getting a degree at Brandeis. And I was asking her about her religious background and she said, well, I'm Christian and I was so ignorant as to say, well, did your family meet missionaries? Right, yeah. And she looked at me like I was stupid, which of course I was. And she said, Bob, we've always been Christians. Don't forget, that's where it started. That's where it started. They've been there all along. All along. Look, you know, I'm an American Jew genealogically. I don't have any connection historically to the Jews who lived back in Bible times. European Jews, and most of the Jews in this country are from European stock like me, were probably converted Caucasian tribe from the 8th century. But look, Americans, again, it's back to our own sort of American, western, centric perspective about things. Palestinians are Arabs. Arabs are all Muslim. So Palestinians are Muslim. We know nothing. But Palestinians, the joke is, and it's not a joke. When you ask a Palestinian Christian, well, when did you convert? You know the stock answer? That would have been Pentecost. 2,000 years ago. That's when we converted to Christianity. We were the first Christians. Jesus was a Palestinian Jew living under Roman occupation. His whole ministry was about nonviolent resistance to the evil of occupation. That's what my books are about. It just blows the whole thing open. That's very much in this book, The Wall in Jerusalem. But let me, before we run out of time, let me ask you this. I know you came back from that trip and you wanted to speak in Jewish synagogues and you wanted to begin to work with people. And you found yourself not as welcome as you had wanted to be, but you found, I think, more welcome in various progressive Christian churches. How do you work with Christian churches, with Christian leaders, with Christian pastors, who have been engaged for some time now quite honorably in the interfaith dialogue ever since the Holocaust saying, oh my God, we've been looking at the Jews as the Christ-hate killers. So they've been forging links with Jews and now they're afraid to criticize Israel, right? Because they might lose their interfaith dialogue. How do you speak to people like that? Yeah, and Bob, that really is the core issue for Christians. Because they will come up to me and they'll say, listen, Mark, I understand what you're saying. We agree with you. We understand we need to do something about Palestine. Tell me how I can do that without being called an anti-Semite. Tell me how I can do that without blowing up my relationship with the Rabbi with whom I have this connection in our community, you know, I'm the pastor. Tell me how I can do that without creating huge family issues with my Jewish son-in-law. And my answer is, I don't have a good answer for you. I don't know that you can and you have to decide that for yourself. This is a tough, tough issue for that very reason. Jewish-Christian reconciliation is a precious relationship for Christians because Christians bear so much of a sense of responsibility, well-deserved, for Jewish suffering for 2,000 years. It was, after all, the Christians who did that, not the Palestinians. Yeah, I mean... Not the Palestinian Arabs, they were... The Palestinians are paying the price... Right. ...for church and Semitism. ...for Western Christian civilization, Western Christianity. Have you kicked the Jews around for 2,000 years? That's all true. Yeah. And the problem is that powerful interests in Israel and in this country are playing that card very powerfully to try to intimidate and stop this movement for justice. And so what I tell my Christian friends is, I can't tell you what to do, but I tell you that, but I think it's a cross to pick up. And if you don't want to pick up that cross, find another cause because that price will be there for you to pay and you have to decide what's right. Yeah. Well, this is maybe getting to a good point to kind of wrap up. If somebody's interested in knowing more, give us that website again. Yeah, it's kairosusa, K-A-I-R-O-S-U-S-A dot org. Okay. It's a good platform and jumping off point to discover all kinds of things that are on the Internet about this movement. And if people want to know any more about our work here in Maine, they should go, or if you haven't been there, go to www.mvprights.org. That's the main voices for Palestinian rights and that's our website. And we also have a Facebook page. So, Mark, thank you very much for coming to Portland, Maine. You're from the other Portland and we claim priority. You were here first. We're glad you came to the original and the true Portland. Glad to have you here and thanks for coming. Thank you, Bob.