The Israel-Palestine Working Group of New England Yearly Meeting (IPWG) had been meeting since 2015, primarily to plan programs at Yearly Meeting Sessions about Palestine-Israel. During those gatherings, we have now organized and facilitated over 60 programs, including workshops, speakers, informal lunch sessions, a Gaza pinwheel display from the American Friends Service Committee, making and flying Gaza-themed kites, photographic displays, slideshows and movies about the region. For the past several years, we have helped write and distribute minutes (statements) from monthly and quarterly meetings.
In 2021 the Permanent Board of New England Yearly Meeting (NEYM) formed a new group, Israel Palestine Resource Group (IPRG), using elements of our former name so we renamed ourselves:
QUAKERS ADVOCATING JUSTICE FOR PALESTINE (QAJP)
We are a small, active, dedicated group from different regions within New England. Most of us have visited Palestine-Israel, some of us multiple times.
Our goals are to foster comprehension of the constantly shifting political landscape, encourage Quaker and individual action, ultimately to contribute to a just peace in Palestine-Israel. We believe strong and fair minutes from NEYM and our constituent monthly and quarterly meetings help foster this goal.
In 2017 we helped New England Yearly Meeting unite on its first-ever minute advocating a just peace in Palestine-Israel. Our yearly meeting was an early yearly meeting to promulgate such a general minute in the United States. Since October 7, 2023, the beginning of the current war between Hamas and Israel, many meetings, yearly, quarterly and monthly have distributed minutes specifically about Gaza. In April 2024 eight leading Quaker organizations circulated a united statement about Gaza, A different future is possible: Quaker organizations share a vision for peace in Palestine and Israel.
Furthermore, national and internationalQuaker groups have named the Gaza carnage genocide.
We work closely with the Israel-Palestine Resource Group under care of Permanent Board of New England Yearly Meeting. We are related to the Quaker Palestine Israel Network (QPIN) and the currently dormant Quakers with a Concern for Palestine-Israel (Ann Arbor Monthly Meeting).
In addition to organizing Palestine-Israel programs at our yearly meeting sessions (see below for 2025) and fostering minutes supporting Palestinian human rights, we have promoted the recently published book Displaced In Gaza, coedited by Yousef M. Aljamal, formerly from the Al-Nusierat refugee camp in Gaza, Noor Nabulsi and Zoe Jannuzi all from the AFSC and Norma Hashim from Viva Palestina Malaysia. We also promote the book Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, also by the AFSC, with a review here.
One of our group’s members, Linden Jenkins, former presiding clerk of NEYM, ended her recent three-month trip at the end of November 2024. She is available for your meeting for discussion about Palestine Israel. (Contact skipschiel@gmail.com to reach her.) Here is her concluding report.
We mourn the loss of one of our former members, Anne Remley, formerly of Ann Arbor MI monthly meeting and most recently of Boulder CO meeting. She’d been instrumental in creating Ann Arbor meeting’s now laid-down website, Palestine Israel Action Group, an early Quaker resource. Anne and her late husband, Fred, pioneered the production and distribution of the 4-part shrinking Palestine map cards showing growing control of Palestine-Israel by the Israeli government. (Those cards are available thru If Americans Knew.) Anne’s obituary-Anne Gardner Remley.
Kirenia Criado Pérez and Benigno Sánchez-Eppler during Bible Half Hours
Who we are: Steve McKnight (Wellesley Meeting, MA), Cliff Bennett (VT) who visited Palestine-Israel for three months in early 2025, Martha Yager (Providence Meeting, RI), several times to the region thru her role as AFSC staff, Linden Jenkins (North Sandwich meeting) and Skip Schiel (Friends Meeting at Cambridge, MA) who has photographed in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel since 2003 .
