A profound sense of shame.......
Aug. 7th, 2007 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osodecanelaI am a Quaker by convincement.
For those of you not particularly familiar with Friends, that means I was not born into the faith. Many might say I converted, but for me it was not so much an issue of conversion, but rather the application of the name to something that I already was.
I was born into a large Jewish immigrant family. Pop's family was Orthodox, having come from Lithuania, the Ukraine, and remotely Turkey. Mom's side was Conservative and hailed from the UK and Lithuania. While my father's side pretty much all made it to the United States prior to World War I, the majority of my mother's family, particularly that of her mother's side perished at the hands of the Nazis. That's not to say that those on my father side of the family were strangers to persecution. My paternal grandmother's last memory of her mother, was of my great-grandmother hiding both grandma and her sister Edith in a pickle barrel at the beginning of a pogrom. Grandma lost both her mother and her older brother that day.
It's given that background that I'm horrified to see people who've known oppression, whether historical or within their own lifetime, oppressing other people. Late Friday afternoon I went to a presentation on fair trade, Palestinian olive oil. A Palestinian woman, a Coptic Christian who grew up on the West Bank and is now currently employed by AFSC (American Friends Service Committee), talked about ways that foreign-born individuals can support Palestinian farmers trying to exist on their own lands. She showed a video of Israeli soldiers harassing unarmed farmers, and destroying centuries-old olive groves in portions of the West Bank. These trees, these olive orchards are crucial for people who're subsistence farmers. Destroy their trees and you destroy their lives. They have little choice but to move on and not continue to live on land where they have existed for centuries. Seeing armed Israeli soldiers, pointing Uzis at un-armed Palestinians, while other soldiers literally bulldozed an entire olive orchard, an orchard still being harvested even as trees were being uprooted, was emotionally devastating. When I think of all the trees that I have had Hadassah plant in Israel, so that the Desert may bloom, I find the destruction of these olive trees even more disturbing. Have I been planting trees in the wrong part of the holy land?
I left the presentation, my eyes moist and slightly red, my cheeks damp, and red with shame. I emerged from the building into some rather bright sunlight and directly in front of me was a display of army boots, and civilian shoes arranged like a memorial on the lawn immediately in front of the campus Center. Each pair of boots bore the name of a soldier who had died in Iraq, every one of them a California native; they were arranged the way headstones are arranged in a military cemetery. The shoes of the civilians were arranged in the pattern of a labyrinth; they too each bore a name, but of a Iraqi civilian casualty. The number of children's shoes I saw, were particularly poignant. This display hit me, much the way the display of shoes confiscated from people as they entered the concentration camps did at Holocaust Museum back in Washington, DC. The exhibit was titled "Eyes Wide Open". While it was extremely well done, it did very little to improve my mood.
That the government of my country, the land of my birth, the land my grandparents sought refuge in to escape the persecution and poverty of their homelands, not only condones, but instigates this violence, saddens and sickens me.
For those of you not particularly familiar with Friends, that means I was not born into the faith. Many might say I converted, but for me it was not so much an issue of conversion, but rather the application of the name to something that I already was.
I was born into a large Jewish immigrant family. Pop's family was Orthodox, having come from Lithuania, the Ukraine, and remotely Turkey. Mom's side was Conservative and hailed from the UK and Lithuania. While my father's side pretty much all made it to the United States prior to World War I, the majority of my mother's family, particularly that of her mother's side perished at the hands of the Nazis. That's not to say that those on my father side of the family were strangers to persecution. My paternal grandmother's last memory of her mother, was of my great-grandmother hiding both grandma and her sister Edith in a pickle barrel at the beginning of a pogrom. Grandma lost both her mother and her older brother that day.
It's given that background that I'm horrified to see people who've known oppression, whether historical or within their own lifetime, oppressing other people. Late Friday afternoon I went to a presentation on fair trade, Palestinian olive oil. A Palestinian woman, a Coptic Christian who grew up on the West Bank and is now currently employed by AFSC (American Friends Service Committee), talked about ways that foreign-born individuals can support Palestinian farmers trying to exist on their own lands. She showed a video of Israeli soldiers harassing unarmed farmers, and destroying centuries-old olive groves in portions of the West Bank. These trees, these olive orchards are crucial for people who're subsistence farmers. Destroy their trees and you destroy their lives. They have little choice but to move on and not continue to live on land where they have existed for centuries. Seeing armed Israeli soldiers, pointing Uzis at un-armed Palestinians, while other soldiers literally bulldozed an entire olive orchard, an orchard still being harvested even as trees were being uprooted, was emotionally devastating. When I think of all the trees that I have had Hadassah plant in Israel, so that the Desert may bloom, I find the destruction of these olive trees even more disturbing. Have I been planting trees in the wrong part of the holy land?
I left the presentation, my eyes moist and slightly red, my cheeks damp, and red with shame. I emerged from the building into some rather bright sunlight and directly in front of me was a display of army boots, and civilian shoes arranged like a memorial on the lawn immediately in front of the campus Center. Each pair of boots bore the name of a soldier who had died in Iraq, every one of them a California native; they were arranged the way headstones are arranged in a military cemetery. The shoes of the civilians were arranged in the pattern of a labyrinth; they too each bore a name, but of a Iraqi civilian casualty. The number of children's shoes I saw, were particularly poignant. This display hit me, much the way the display of shoes confiscated from people as they entered the concentration camps did at Holocaust Museum back in Washington, DC. The exhibit was titled "Eyes Wide Open". While it was extremely well done, it did very little to improve my mood.
That the government of my country, the land of my birth, the land my grandparents sought refuge in to escape the persecution and poverty of their homelands, not only condones, but instigates this violence, saddens and sickens me.
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Date: 2007-08-08 05:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-08 06:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-08 06:06 pm (UTC)