“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

“A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man’s social conditions….Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind the Marxists like to see—an opiate of the people.”

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, quality and freedom for their spirit. Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody.”

“All too many of those who live in affluent America ignore those who exist in poor America. In doing so, the affluent Americans will eventually have to face themselves with the question that Eichmann chose to ignore: How responsible am I for the well-being of my fellows? To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.”

“Let us say it boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the law breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.”

“There is nothing that expressed massive civil disobedience any more than the Boston Tea Party, and yet we give this to our young people and our students as a part of the great tradition of our nation. So I think we are in good company when we break unjust laws, and I think those who are willing to do it and accept the penalty are those who are part of the saving of the nation.”

“The straitjackets of race prejudice and discrimination do not wear only Southern labels. The subtle, psychological technique of the North has approached in its ugliness and victimization of the Negro the outright terror and open brutality of the South.”

“Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato or Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermo-dynamics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

At the same time, that 99% of the clergy have been silent or quietly opposed, or even actively opposed, is for me a Jeremiah-sized lament. They have failed to recognize that this is more than a movement opposing corporate state bailouts and corporate controlled governments. It is a movement that challenges our very way of being in community. It challenges and condemns our celebrity culture and our atomistic consumerist culture; and for those of us who still name ourselves Christians, it is beginning to shame our spiritualized Christian culture.

We like to quote Dietrich Bonheoffer’s “Cost of Discipleship” as we are able to spiritualize and privatize it to where it has no bearing on how we live outwardly. We forget that Bonheoffer also said things like, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

Chris Hedges is one who is leading the “spoke driving”. On Sunday he gave a speech worthy of MLK at Trinity Church in New York. (I thank my friend Connie Howard for pointing me to it.) It was in fact a sermon that should be circulated, perhaps used as a template, in churches across the land. Holding up the Beatitudes—from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount—on behalf of social justice and the Occupy movement will offend many including salvationist-Christians, but I have a notion that it won’t offend Jesus.

My friend Peter wrote to say, “I read your article in today’s journal, and as usual I am always intrigued by your thoughts…In terms of content, I found your views somewhat apocalyptic – something I have had cause to wonder about given my perception that there seems to be a lack of balanced perspective going on in today’s topics du jour. I recall as a young man returning from my military trips delivering aid through Africa and the Asian sub-content with a profound sense of how fortunate we are where we live, and how little many who live here appreciate or understand that good fortune. This has led me more recently to wonder why it is we have such good fortune, while others don’t, and I become more and more convinced it is due to the evolution of our politics. I know many disagree with that, and attribute our good fortune to exploitation of others, but I don’t believe that stands up to scrutiny when one looks at countries in the last 50 – 60 years that have moved towards a similar political system and those that have moved away – contrast North and South Korea for example, India and Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Ghana, and so on. I didn’t mean to get diverted onto this topic, but given the tone of your article, I thought you might find the attached article and book a refreshing antidote to the gloom visited on us 24 hours a day.”

Here’s my far too lengthy response: (Besides being lengthy it also takes a theological turn; just wanted to warn you. Feel free to stop reading anytime.)

First of all, it’s gratifying to remember how our military was known for peace keeping and delivering aid. The last decade seems to have blotted out this memory.

Secondly, that even bad democracies are better than good totalitarian states, and that this has in part contributed to our good fortune, I think is accurate. However, that our fortune hasn’t on some level been due to exploitation, I think is inaccurate. I would only point to our own country’s historical expropriation of land and exploitation of First Nations people. There are more examples.

Most intriguing however was the essay (I’ve discovered more essays) and the book Peter referenced.

In "Our Better Angels,” author Steven Pinker has shown through some pretty exhaustive research and an accumulation of data that violence, contrary to our belief and intuition, has actually decreased over the centuries. We’ve taken it for granted that the 20 century has been the bloodiest ever, but according to Pinker, we may be living in the most peaceful time in human history.

Of course, there are several ways to interpret data. Mr. Pinker’s choice is to view data on violence in relative terms, and not in absolute terms. The principal behind this, as one blogger put it, is that 10 people killing 4 is less violent than 4 people killing 2—which for many of us without the data, is hard to accept since over 100 million people were killed in 20th century terrorist attacks, genocides and wars. Still as Pinker has shown, violent death per capita, has fallen.

However, there are those that say his research is hardly broad enough and dispute his findings. And there are some who dispute his interpretation.

Personally I find it impossible to draw hard conclusions when it comes to statistics on violence. Because violence is more than a body count. Consider the intensity of violence (Hiroshima, Holocaust), the new impersonal violence of drones, consider war’s injuries, physical and psychological, which apparently isn’t part of the data. And as well, forms of cultural and religious violence are still prevalent; gang violence is rising, and domestic violence, violence against women is only beginning to be addressed.

So concerning per capita death, our intuitions may be off. But considering violence on a broad scale, probably not. Here is a 2002 study by the World Health Organization on a more comprehensive view of violence; it doesn’t dispute Pinker’s findings, but would dispute his interpretation.

That Pinker may be ideologically driven to support a particular view of human progress may or may not be true, but to look for instances of light, as he does, is hardly a bad thing in this climate. An attempt at balance that my friend rightly pointed out.

Whatever the case, it’s important not to dismiss Pinker’s work. The last paragraph of the (forwarded) article by Steven Pinker is most intriguing to me:

“But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man’s inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” If our behavior has improved so much since the days of the Bible, we must be doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.”

Earlier, Pinker talks about the rise of empathy, the possibility that evolution could have even bequeathed us with an "empathy" gene.

I like Pinker’s reversal of the question. Because asking why there is peace—or if I can rephrase, why in our state of apparent perpetual war, are there outbreaks of peace—gets at the kernel of anthropologist Rene Girard’s theory of desire. A theory I’ve dropped into Grow Mercy since the outset of this blog. And a theory that casts new light on Christian revelation, or better; through it, Christian revelation is more fully revealed—and as such, it introduces ourselves to ourselves.

Here’s a story by Brian MacDonald that encapsulates Girard’s theory:

“Picture two young children playing happily on their porch, a pile of toys beside them. The older child pulls a G.I. Joe from the pile and immediately, his younger brother cries out, “No, my toy!”, pushes him out of the way, and grabs it. The older child, who was not very interested in the toy when he picked it up, now conceives a passionate need for it and attempts to wrest it back. Soon a full fight ensues, with the toy forgotten and the two boys busy pummelling each other.

As the fight intensifies, the overweight child next door wanders into their yard and comes up to them, looking for someone to play with. At that point, one of the two rivals looks up and says, “Oh, there’s old fat butt!” “Yeah,” says his brother. “Big fat butt!” The two, having forgotten the toy, now forget their fight and run the child back home. Harmony has been restored between the two brothers, though the neighbor is now indoors crying.”

With a bit of imagination we can easily see how this little story operates on communal and national levels. We form social groupings—often without even being aware of it—through scapegoating, through being over and against the Other—other groups, other nations etc. Think of junior high school, the office cliques, the Balkan wars and the sudden nationalistic fracturing of countries.

MacDonald goes on:

“It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Girard builds his whole theory of human nature and human culture through a close analysis of the dynamics operating in this story. Most human desires are not “original” or spontaneous, he argues, but are created by imitating another whom he calls the “model.” When the model claims an object, that tells another that it is desirable—and that he must have it instead of him. Girard calls this “mimetic” (or imitative) desire. In the subsequent rivalry, the two parties will come to forget the object and will come to desire the conflict for itself. Harmony will only be restored if the conflicting parties can vent their anger on a common enemy or “scapegoat.

With the lucidity characteristic of French thought before the “deconstructionist” writers, and a consistency reminiscent of Calvin, Girard shows, throughout the body of his work, how his theory of “mimetic” desire can illuminate and unify an extraordinarily disparate set of human phenomena. It can explain everything from sacrifice to conflict, from mythology to Christianity.”

The theory of mimetic desire also explains Pinker’s findings, which of course are not original to Pinker. For example, it takes into account the anthropological and archaeological data that there probably wasn’t an idyllic era of tranquillity, but that ritualistic tribal and national violence, covered by mythical interpretations, was a near if not entirely a universal phenomenon.

But Girard’s hypothesis—his anthropological reading of the bible and the gospels—also takes into account what Pinker says about the seeming increase of empathy, while at the same time explaining the volatility of our world.

It may sound odd to say that gospel revelation is responsible for both the rise of consciousness of the victim, the ‘outbreaks of peace’, as well as the greater volatility of social violence. But the gospel story revealed the innocence of the victim, revealed the workings of the mechanism and so dealt it a death blow—because it only work effectively when undetected. The “peace” once gained through the surrogate victim, the mutual enemy, is now, in this stage of our evolution, entirely precarious, because we see through it.

Pinker of course is an atheist and would no doubt scoff at this suggestion. And yet, to honestly take in the arch of the past two millennia, we should see that in no other time has the victim been as visible in art and literature, in our judicial policies and politics. There has been an evolution of empathy. We no longer believe that it was the sins of parents that caused blindness in their child.

Victims for the most part are spared blame, we don’t believe they deserve their state. This evolution, the process of hominization, our calling into humanity, had its culmination in the gospel story. It was this that exposed our common culpability for scapegoating. This mechanism which is the founding principle of religion and culture, was exploded by Jesus, who gave himself to it, in order to forever expose it.

But in exposing it, it lost its power. Scapegoating no longer works, or at least, it no longer lasts. And this is both Good News and dangerous news—a precarious freedom requiring great responsibility.

Of course the richness of Girard’s research and mimetic theory goes far beyond what can be said here, except to say that Pinker’s research, like Girard’s, suggests humanity was founded on violence. Girard simply goes further and shows that the process of hominization, or the calling of humanity into freedom, is an evolution away from the generative principle of social grouping.

Along the way he offends human progress secularists through his realism and warnings, and by his adoption of the gospel as the key that demythologizes our justifications of sacrificial violence.

But as much or more, he offends Christians who hold to a traditional (since Anselm) propitiationary theory of atonement: The reversion to a sacrificial reading of scripture, that sees Jesus’ death as an appeasing sacrifice to a wrathful God. Our failure to see Jesus as a “sacrifice” that exploded the sacrificial systems, instead of another Aztec-like sacrifice, only on a grand scale, has been the tragedy of Christendom. And it is why Christians are still able to justify violence and war.

The life, death and resurrection of Jesus was the ultimate overthrowing of religion and sacrifice, the ultimate intrusion of mercy that should have resulted in the growth of mercy, because it revealed a God entirely free of wrath and violence and sacrificial hankering—and the possibility of true peace on earth.

But beyond this, how much has really changed?  Fear is still ratcheted up; security is still and ever our god, as trust erodes; and violence in all its forms is further entrenched, even as its effectiveness steadily vanishes. Normal has simply gotten worse.

Seems to me that to believe that everything has changed is to ignore the ubiquity of our old disease and its symptoms, there for all to see. To believe that everything has changed, that 9-11 somehow exposed our nationalistic innocence and vulnerability is just another way the age-old lie of sacrificial violence is maintained.

Think back to the ensuing days of 9-11. Were we not all caught up? Suddenly we were all patriots. A phrase that echoed through the western world’s networks was, "We are all Americans now." And suddenly the churches were full—most every church flying an American flag. A spontaneous and unholy impression of unanimity. With our ersatz kinship and goodness suddenly rediscovered, we hastily sought a target for our now justified outrage. No questioning the declaration of vengeance issued by the American president from behind a church pulpit. No reflection beyond retaliation, only a question of how soon.

In this kind of collective unrest blame finds its target; the target’s guilt obvious by virtue of it being targeted, and so excluded; and the death and destruction of distant neighbourhoods or nations, neatly vindicated.

What can descend like dew in this confusion? Can artists, poets, and writers, regardless of faith, put flesh on the bleaching bones of peace and liberation?

This is a time for the dew of beauty to descend. A time like so many other times. And yet, a heightened and urgent time, if only for the stark and burgeoning fact that there are no other solutions than mercy and nonviolence. (A mercy modelled and lived out best, to my mind, by Jesus.)

The way of mercy and nonviolence is all we have left. It was only and always what we had left, but we were taken in by the lie of sacrificial violence, co-opted by a culture based on death. If not growing mercy, and precipitous nonviolence, as remote as this appears, what remains, is apocalyptic violence—the escalation to extreme forms of reciprocal reprisals.

Yet, in the midst of this long shot are outbreaks of truth and compassion, humanizing moments, emerging groups of non-possessed people. So here’s a call to the artists and artisans to become the new anchors of real change.

At this final stop of our walk, I want to acknowledge your participation. You may well be asked cynically what you think you’ve achieved by this.  Some inspiration can be drawn from a silent protester during the era of nuclear testing.  Amman Hennacy, a Catholic layman, marching alone one day with his sign, was taunted by a reporter who asked: “Do you really think that you can change the world by doing this?”  “Oh no” he replied, “I don’t do this to change the world;  I do this to keep the world from changing me.”
    As you’ve gleaned by now, our prayer focus this year is for the countless victims of war, including soldiers, on all sides of current conflicts.  Tonight we remember, and cry out for them, Lord have mercy! 
    In 2006 a Robert Weitzel wrote satirically that “Victims of War Are Not To Be Seen, Or Heard, Or Mentioned”, and then quoted War Photographer David Leeson who said “The greatest dignity and respect you can give victims of war is to show the horror they suffered…”  Tonight we do mention, we do remember, and we pray for them.

    Weitzel tells of Joseph Bonham, an American soldier who lost both arms, both
legs, and all of his face to an artillery shell.  He could not see or hear or speak.  Other than that, ironically, he was healthy and lucid.  But that was Joe’s nightmare.  He could be kept alive a long time. 
    Joe remained an anonymous torso until his head tapping was recognized as Morse code.  When his message was finally understood, it was assumed he’d gone insane, because Joe asked to be put on exhibit so that children, and parents, and teachers, and politicians, and preachers, and patriots of every stripe could have a close-up look at war’s leavings.  It was the only way he could give his nightmare meaning.  But Joe Bonham’s request was denied, with the defensive rationale that it was not in the best interest of the country.  Having lost everything else,  this final vestige of meaning was also stripped from him.  He died an “unknown” soldier.
    Dwight D. Eisenhower, a highly respected military general during WW2,  who later became president of the United States of America, said near the end of his term in office:  “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, in the final analysis, represents a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed…” 

   So today we pray. . . for the hungry, the unclothed, and the homeless; for families torn apart by the demands, and the consequences, of war; for widows and orphans; for farmers whose lands have been contaminated, infested with land mines, and waters polluted; for children deprived of schooling, healthcare, and food; or soldiers suffering in army hospitals, bodies maimed, and spirits broken; for mothers and children whose husbands and fathers will never return; for innocent civilians whose homes and communities have been destroyed; for captives subjected to torture.

   For all victims of war, we pray, and help us to find ways to be agents of healing, and hope for them, and champions of peace to prevent, and to end wars, Lord have mercy! through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Below: Ike (wearing the hat) and his wife Millie (far right) with some friends.

On these few points there is recollection within our family, on the rest of the story there is ambiguity. That’s probably because my father never made a thing about being a conscientious objector. Only his actions revealed his convictions; on the finer points, he was silent. There was no moralizing, no kitchen-table debates with phantom war mongers, no regimented training in nonviolence, and no banners hung from our house.

And yet, these many years later, I see how my father could have been a local embarrassment. Even on the most innocuous level, being a conscientious objector is like volunteering to be the skinny kid on a Charles Atlas beach. On the other end of the scale, CO’s are seen as traitors to cause and country. After the first world war the Canadian government, pressed by public opinion, rescinded the privileges of an 1873 Order in Council and barred entry to Mennonite immigrants. It was successfully repealed a few years later, but the passions that surround war,  specifically the second world war, again made ripe the possibility of targeted persecution.

I don’t know how those days unfolded for my father, and I don’t know how he felt or what his thoughts were in the middle of the night. What I’m awake to today is that conscientious objectors do not, and did not, take the path of least resistance. Often bearing social outcast status, they took on roles of noncombatant military service, from serving on medical wards to gathering the injured from the front lines. Some were asked, or were enlisted, for medical experiments, some volunteered for prolonged starvation in order to study its effect and apply the knowledge gained to help POWs. The more fortunate ones, like my father, were allowed to stay where they were and work.

All this has settled in upon me and my many years of adherence to "just war" theory in an unexpected way; like some epigenetic trigger pulled, like the apple not falling far from the tree, I’ve been slowly encircled by the notion that the fundamental evil of violence can only be met by nonviolence; that nonviolence is not an addendum to Christianity, but is at the heart; that the life and the death of Jesus exposes the myth of redemptive violence. I have come to see that not only the theology, but the anthropology of the cross, is this: that peace through blood shed is not merely temporary, but finally a lie.

I do not have the strength of my father. But I do hope to embrace his example—that it is possible to have the quiet dexterity of heart and mind to compassionately remember the war dead, without in any way honouring and legitimizing war.

If there is any period in the Christian calendar when we should become conscious of our addiction to violence, it is along the Lenten road: destination Easter. No other event has so exposed the root of human sacrificial violence, the mechanism of exclusion upon which we build society.

We esteem the giants of nonviolence, but seldom does it enter our minds that active non-violence should be a consistent Christian discipline. One that is practised, rehearsed, alive to the vagaries and complexities of present time and place, alive to the challenges of a culture that accepts redemptive violence as fait accompli.

As it is, we don’t study peace; we study war.

In refusing to accept the rationality or the morality of war — our war in Afghanistan, for example — I do not wish, in the least, to dishonour the soldiers who have been killed, or the troops engaged or preparing to engage in active duty.

And yet, I accept being misunderstood here because I see how difficult it is to disentangle a condemnation of the war from an expression of earnest support and compassion for the lives and the families of soldiers. It’s like condemning a tattoo my son has consciously chosen as his form of self-expression and self-identification. My reassurances of love fail as my son reads my disapproval of his tattoo as my rejection of him.

But even this comparison falls short, for the issue of war and nonviolence is more than skin deep. In the eyes of most people who are supportive of our military, a pacifist stand is near treasonous. I think this, because I once thought of pacifists this way.

Pacifism has a positive mystique but a negative pragmatism. It’s held romantically, if not quixotically, in the mind, as in, "wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were all peace loving people?" But it’s dismissed as a realistic position; "imagine what would have happened if we didn’t stop Hitler."

There is also the charge of pacifism’s seeming self-righteousness, its unwillingness to get its hands dirty and the implicit accusation of cowardice. These are important criticisms. But we do have examples to counter these charges.

Not many would accuse Justin Martyr, Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and, in our own day, Jesuit priest John Dear and Austrian antiwar activist Hildegard Goss-Mayr of pharisaism or cowardice. Active non-violence, that is true pacifism — the opposite of passivism — requires courage (to say nothing of a creativity) that is at least equal to that required by active involvement in war.

But what propels these peace-wielders to throw themselves, unarmed, between persecutors and the persecuted? What is it that is obvious to them regarding the upshot of Jesus’ life, that is for us shrouded in pragmatic and theological trade-offs? It’s as though — while the rest of us debate the currency of just-war theory — a huge, harm-revoking love has ruptured their day-to-day lives.

They appear caught by the Spirit through the Jesus of Easter; love is their omega point. They are marked by empathy, compassion, a holism that refuses moral categorization between personal and public, and the inability to dehumanize and subsequently dispatch an enemy.

And before all this, they are marked by the ability to detect envy, rivalry and violence in their own hearts. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it, they have come to know, "Nonviolence is not just one implication among others that can be drawn from our Christian beliefs; it is the very heart of our understanding of God."

We hold the Gospel as fundamental guide, hold it as close to its literal reading as scripture itself allows, and yet support "refined interrogation techniques," military campaigns that protect economic interests and war; and we sit confounded as to why violence at home is growing.

We study war because we are addicted to violence, particularly redemptive violence. And our addiction holds because violence — in lock-step with any deep dependency — works for a while.

Easter opens to us the opportunity for detoxification like no other event in the Christian calendar.

Caught in the Easter eyes of the victim, forgiven, divisions drop away and the possibility dawns for life lived as though death is behind us. With death no longer our orientation, false peace through aggression is undone.

Active non-violence, practised in love over time, answers both the rational and moral arguments for war. At the same time Christian peace activists withhold judgment upon those trapped by starvation, or the brutalized, who resort to armed resistance. Here, a true pacifist’s only witness is her presence.

For the rest of us, we have the God of Easter to undergo. In the end it’s not about pacifism or non-pacifism, it’s about doing the truth in love within the unfathomable freedom of death-defeated.

 Published in the Edmonton Journal, Religion, March 27, 2010

Even the Jerusalem Post was juiced, sputtering, "a staggering example of diplomatic obtuseness." 

Netanyahu for his part threw up his hands saying he had been “blindsided by extremists in his coalition, who control the interior ministry.” No Bibi, it was more like you got nipped by the horse that feeds you.

He wasn’t, couldn’t have been unaware of the settlements, just, perhaps, the announcement. Which means that Netanyahu’s still full-speed ahead on the colonization front, but somewhat flushed over the headlines. He probably would have preferred to curb the glee while hosting visitors from Capital Hill. But then, who knows, another game of chicken with Barak might be fun since the outcome is assured.

And that’s the sadness: Obama started his presidency demanding a settlement freeze and promising fair play for Palestinians. But a few sleeps and the thing collapsed when US ceded to Netanyahu’s offer of a 10-month building moratorium in the West Back. Ten months? That was the best they could do? No one heard the word temporary in the speech, but that was the upshot.

But it’s more than this. The main point about the settlements, outposts, housing units, says Prof. Iain Scobbie, who eats and sleeps international law,

is not that they obstruct diplomacy — which they do — but rather that they are illegal. Occupied territory is not under the sovereignty of the occupant. It cannot treat the territory it occupies as it sees fit. An occupant’s powers are circumscribed by international law, which unequivocally prohibits the settlement of part of its population, whether forcible or voluntary, in that territory. While this prohibition arises from Article 49, Article 1 requires parties not merely to respect the terms of the convention in their own conduct but also to ensure that others do. All states are party to the Geneva Conventions, therefore all states have the duty to ensure that Israel’s illegal policy of creating settlements in occupied Palestinian territory ceases without further delay.

With Israel having broken the Oslo agreement, the Geneva Convention and not a few UN resolutions, was Obama just a tad optimistic, or just naive when he called for reassurances from B.N. concerning a freeze on settlements?

Back to that game of chicken: Could it happen that Pres. Obama will be so vexed by the flagrancy of the rebuff that he’ll straddle the white line with nary a flinch? Spilling Benjamin and the Lekud boys into the ditch? And why not, why not give Israel their “independence”? Stop the aid, at least cut it back.

Last year the U.S. gave 3 billion dollars to Israel in Foreign aid, and they gave .5 billion to Palestine. But it’s military aid that’s telling.  The U.S. gives Israel $7.0 million each day in military aid.

And what can we do back here in the alpines? Well, we can boycott Israeli products for one. (Check here as well. And here: Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods) Admittedly the companies that have ties to Israel and support Israel are legion. But every wise consumer choice counts.

Boycott, divestment, and sanctions are important, and so is your voice. I have faith that Israeli and American governments are capable of shame. And that means our voices, our nonviolent actions, can be effective. There are, in Israel (Jews for Palestinian Justice) and America, and in our own country, organizations that call for justice for Palestinians. The voices are growing stronger.