Jewish, Palestinian, and Quaker voices come together to explore the question “Why do Quakers care about Israel Palestine?” A QuakerSpeak video with a Quaker call to action on Israel-Palestine: Jennifer Bing, AFSC Middle East Program Director; Rabbi Brant Rosen, former AFSC Midwest Education Director; Ayah Bashir in Gaza; and Tamara Tamimi, Jerusalem
Jean Zaru is a Palestinian Quaker from Ramallah Friends Meeting. In 2019, she sent this video message to Annual Sessions.
Chris Jorgenson traveled twice to the region, most recently in early 2020 to volunteer at the Ramallah Friends School
Carole Rein explored the region in 2018 and has spoken about her experiences to numerous Quaker meetings in New England.
Seeing in Palestine, an article by Carole Rein about her 2018 journey to the Holy Land
Skip Schiel has photographed in the region since 2003 and currently concentrates on his project, “The Ongoing and Relentless Nakba.”
More coming from activists, stay tuned to this channel
Israeli border police arrest a Palestinian youth for throwing stones at their checkpoint in Ras al-Amud neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Friday Sept. 23, 2011, just hours before their president, Mahmoud Abbas, was to deliver his widely anticipated request to the UN. Photo by Mahfouz Abu Turk
Northwest Quarterly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, March 7, 2021: No Way to Treat a Child
Minute 2021-03-10
We recognize our own involvement in the incarceration of children and youth, most of them black and brown, here in the United States. Whether in prisons or cages for recent immigrants, this is no way to treat children. We ask New England Yearly Meeting to begin to join in this work.
Spirit leads Northwest Quarterly Meeting to ask New England Yearly Meeting to engage wholeheartedly with American Friends Service Committee’s No Way to Treat a Child campaign “which seeks to challenge and end Israel’s prolonged military occupation of Palestinians by exposing widespread and systematic ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system.” This rights-based effort to halt ongoing infringement of children’s human rights stems from Friends’ belief that no child should be denied due process or tortured.
NEYM Minute 2019-36 urged monthly and quarterly meetings to live into Minute 2017-46, particularly as it applies to Gaza and the West Bank. Consequently, Northwest Quarter requests that New England Yearly Meeting embrace No Way to Treat a Child by calling upon Friends everywhere to endeavor to end these violations of children’s human rights by:
Learning how placing children in military prisons violates international law and impedes the right to a childhood;
Talking with members of Congress to co-sponsor the bill that replaces H.R. 2407 – “Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under the Israeli Military;
Writing letters in local newspapers as one of many ways of How Quakers can join No Way to Treat a Child;
Accompanying American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)—as led locally, nationally, and internationally—in that Quaker organization’s effort to end “the Israeli occupation of Palestinians by exposing the systematic ill treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention;”
Connecting what Friends learn about settler colonialism, here in the States, transnationally with Israel Palestine.
—Approved Northwest Quarterly Meeting March 7, 2021
Background information:
While urging Friends everywhere to engage wholeheartedly with American Friends Service Committee’s No Way To Treat A Child program, Quakers in northwestern New England—originally Abenaki/Pennacook land—committed themselves to address systemic racism within our own meetings and communities in Vermont and western New Hampshire: “We recognize our own involvement in the incarceration of children and youth, most of them black and brown, here in the United States.”
The March 7th decision followed earlier approval that Northwest Quarterly Meeting had given No Way To Treat a Child when it convened in Middlebury on December 8, 2019 and again in Burlington on March 8, 2020. This month’s expanded endorsement was an essential and courteous “assist” to New England Yearly Meeting’s presiding clerk who is preparing for Quaker’s upcoming annual meeting in August 2021.
Friends recognized that it is important work that could not wait for three months until their next Quarterly Meeting to continue. The path to their March 2021 decision began 15 months earlier when Northeast Kingdom Quaker Meeting urged Northwest Quarterly Meeting to endorse AFSC’s rights-based campaign, No Way to Treat a Child—“which seeks to challenge and end Israel’s prolonged military occupation of Palestinians by exposing widespread and systematic ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system.”
Consequently, Friends acknowledged the enlargement of what we had already approved a year ago by including five action steps. One of these urges local Quakers to apply what they are learning about settler colonialism here in the States, transnationally with Israel Palestine.
Earlier the yearly meeting’s presiding clerk, Bruce Neumann, had urged Northwest Quarter Friends to be as specific as possible—while waiting for the new House Resolution that replaces HR 2407— about naming steps that describe how Friends can “endeavor to end these violations of children’s human rights” as AFSC has urged for a number of years.
“Great openings” appear as this spring’s massive protests make visible the many connections among oppressed communities seeking justice. The Israel Palestine Working Group (IPWG)—activists nurturing comprehension of shifting realities—asks Friends during 2020 sessions to affirm that the Equality Testimony is universal. Let us embrace our awareness of unity among all who seek justice both nationally and globally.
Can we unite, now, when asked to accompany the oppressed? There was no discussion last year when Friends heard internationally renowned Palestinian Quaker lecturer and author Jean Zaru challenge NEYM to make a decision about whom we are accompanying—the oppressor or the oppressed?
IPWG’s major emphasis this year is AFSC’s No Way To Treat A Child campaign. Northwest Quarterly Meeting’s Minute 202038 asks Friends, at 2020 sessions, to support HR 2407: Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under the Israeli Military Occupation Act. This national effort invites us all to 1) Educate folks about Palestinian children incarcerated in Israeli military prisons and H.R. 2407; 2) Write an op-ed in support of H.R. 2407; 3) Lobby Congress on behalf of H.R. 2407, as an individual or group.
IPWG coordinated an endorsement of AFSC’s call for Israel to release all children from military prisons with the Racial Social Economic Justice Committee; together with RSEJ, we also asked Friends to work for the release of those most vulnerable to Covid-19 in U.S. prisons.
One of our 2019 lunchtime discussions focused on the paucity of Monthly Meeting and Yearly Meeting connections with AFSC’s efforts to achieve justice in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Another looked at Jewish Voice for Peace’s Deadly Exchange campaign to end Israeli military training of police across the United States. More HERE.
In another 2019 business meeting, the presiding clerk asked Skip Schiel to speak about his 17 years of activism in Palestine: a witness that was visible in an exhibit of Skip’s photographs from his two-month journey last spring. He answered questions about “The Ongoing Nakba” during a dinner presentation.
IPWG makes available The Promised Land Exhibit, a set of traveling panels from The Jewish Museum of the Palestinian Experience. Monthly meetings find it to be helpful as they search for the meaning of antisemitism, colonization, Islamophobia, racism, and Zionism.
In other developments this year: Cliff Bennett attended the Third Conference of Scientists for Palestine at MIT; Northeast Kingdom MM approved a travel minute for Scott and Susan Rhodewalt; and Palestine Museum in Woodbridge, Connecticut featured Skip Schiel’s The Ongoing Nakba photographic project exhibit.
Our WEBSITE is a resource for Friends to discern who to accompany in seeking justice. Knowing that “an injury to one is an injury to all” we remember “there is no justice until there is justice for all.”
*George Fox used the phrase “Great Openings“ many times in his journal to refer to revelations and discoveries of the spirit, as in this passage, “great openings concerning the things written in the Revelations.”
Skip Schiel, Clerk
Scott Rhodewalt, Recording Clerk
NEYM 2020 sessions will be ONLINE. Our working group’s plans include two webinars, The Promised Land Exhibit with Steve Feldman, its founder, and Max Carter, former faculty member of Guilford College, and long time activist for Palestinian rights; and discussion of the annexation of major portions of the West Bank and Jordan Valley, possibly with four American Friends Service Committee staff, Dilit Baum, Sahar Vardi, and Mike Merryman-Lotz, Dawood Hammoudeh, and Jehad Abusalim.
Palestinian prisoners sit during visiting hours at Israel’s Gilboa prison (AFP)
Friends’ compassion for those who are imprisoned (about 2.3 million) leads us* to call for monthly and yearly meetings throughout this nation to support:
American Friends Service Committee’s call for compassionate release of elderly people and others who are medically vulnerable; (AFSC)
Palestine’s request that Israel “take immediate action to release all Palestinian child detainees in Israeli prisons due to the rapid global spread of the COVID-19 virus” as this is No Way To Treat A Child. (DCIP)
Quakers’ legacy of being imprisoned offers us empathy for all who face the current pandemic while detained in intrinsically unsanitary and crowded conditions. Incarceration during the time of plague is genocide. Consequently, the Israel Palestine Working Group and the Racial, Social, and Economic Justice committee of NEYM urge all Friends to work for the release of the vulnerable.
*The Israel Palestine Working Group and the Racial, Social, and Economic Justice Committee of New England Yearly Meeting
Inmates at California’s Chino State Prison sit inside a metal cage in the hallway as they wait to be assigned permanent housing or for medical, mental health, counselor or other appointments. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
All ten members of NEYM’s Israel-Palestine Working Group (IPWG) recognize significant challenges in our efforts to: educate monthly meetings, open Friends’ collective hearts, and seek justice in the constantly shifting political landscape of Palestine-Israel.
Whose voice, in any conversation about Israel-Palestine, do Friends hear in our monthly meetings? Is it the voice of the colonizers or the colonized, the occupier or the occupied, the oppressor or the oppressed? Who do we accompany?
Israeli elites, who hold power in Israel today, are children and grandchildren of displaced European and north African Jewish refugees to a land where Palestinians lived. Descendants of those Palestinians now live, largely, in Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem and overseas as refugees exiled from their homes in 1948 and again in 1967. Israeli Jews and exiled Palestinians live with the moral injury of the Holocaust and the Nakba. This is not a conflict of equals despite the message our media relay: Israel’s government imposes its massive power asymmetrically upon the “other”.
NEYM has access to Friends United Meeting’s wealth of experience and understanding through 150 years of service in Palestine as Ramallah Friends School celebrates its founding in 1869. Another resource is Charles Friou, who shares photographs he took in 1949-50 in Gaza while working with American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) with Palestinian refugees whom Israelis had expelled from their nearby homes in what had just become Israel.
Our goal as a working group is to help Friends untangle threads of antisemitism, Islamophobia, Zionism, and colonization. Once again, at summer sessions, we hope to:
welcome visitors with Palestinian and Israeli heritage;
join other racial justice related working groups’ efforts in NEYM;
organize outdoor displays, lunch talks; workshops and an indoor photography exhibit;
engage monthly meetings with AFSC’s current projects: “End the Blockade” and “No Way to Treat a Child”;
support campaign against Israel’s training U.S. police;
circulate Burlington MM’s Minutes for Gaza and Deadly Exchange.
Several members have served on New England Network for Justice for Palestine (NENJP), Quaker Palestine Israel Network (QPIN), and AFSC committees and staff. One member assisted planning AFSC’s eight-city tour (including his speech at Harvard) of Ahmed Abu Artema—Gazan poet whose writing inspired the weekly nonviolent Right of Return March to the separation barrier between Gaza and Israel. We sponsored the “Promised Land Exhibit” at Cambridge Meeting House and Northwest quarterly meeting at Hanover.
Our long-term goals are ambitious: establish a memorial fund in Sandy and Nancy Isaacs and Joyce Rawitscher’s memory to promote education about Israel/Palestine, organize NEYM delegations to visit Palestine-Israel in coming months and years (IPWG members, who have visited Palestine-Israel numerous times, know how much monthly meetings will learn by sending members there), expand links with neym-ip.org, and develop social media activity.
Invite us to your monthly meeting as you struggle to discern how to accompany the colonized and the colonizer, the oppressed and the oppressor.
Our schedule for New England Yearly Meeting sessions-2019- Castleton VT-August 3-8
As international attention on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians—occupation and blockade—increases, our Israel-Palestine Working Group produced the following program at our annual five-day New England Yearly Meeting (NEYM) Sessions:
Outdoor displays: photos from Gaza and a pin wheel display memorializing the recent dead in Gaza
Workshops: Building a Just Peace in Palestine-Israel with John Reuwer and Laurie Gagne, plus Moving our Meetings to Take Action on Israel-Palestine with Minga Claggett-Borne and Jonathan Vogel-Borne
Informal lunch chats
Photographic exhibition: Gaza Awaken by Skip Schiel
A special visit and presentation by a colleague from Gaza, Dr. Mustafa El-Hawi
(Click here for more info and here for photographs of Sessions)
However, we failed to bring our annual report to meeting for worship with the intention of business, a staple of this Yearly Meeting. Click Talking Points (Word)for our report’s talking points, with illustrations.
FROM BURLINGTON FRIENDS MEETING, BURLINGTON, VERMONT, JUNE 10, 2018
Friends’ concern for the sufferings of all peoples leads us to oppose the recent escalation of violence by the Israeli political establishment against the Palestinians of Gaza. How should we as Quakers respond to this tragedy still taking place along the border of the Gaza Strip? [which began in late March, 2018, and continues thru this posting, July 4, 2018]
Gaza contains nearly 2 million residents in an area of 141 sq. miles. Israel imposes an economic cordon sanitaire around the region with the result that its economy is nearly destroyed and 80 percent of residents rely on international assistance. Travel in and out is sharply restricted by Israel and Egypt.
Since March 30, 2018, thousands of residents of Gaza, more than 80 percent of whom are refugees or the descendants of those displaced during the establishment of Israel in 1947, began marching toward the barriers that keep them from work, travel, foreign markets, and their ancestral lands. While still within Gaza, they were met by Israeli snipers who shot into Gaza from embankments across the line. On May 14 alone, 58 demonstrators were shot dead and 1,360 wounded with fragmentation rounds that often lead to amputations and permanent crippling. The dead include 6 children.
As a response to this unarmed, non-violent civilian protest, these premeditated and systematic shootings are a clear violation of international norms which forbid targeting noncombatants and require proportionality in the use of force, even in wartime. Clearly marked members of the press and the Red Crescent have been among the victims.
The United States is deeply complicit in these events. Since 1946, the U.S. has given Israel $134.7 billion in military and missile defense aid, $3.775 billion in 2017 alone. The weapons purchased are used to kill Palestinians. On April 6, the United States vetoed a UN Security Council resolution supporting the right of Palestinians to “demonstrate peacefully” and endorsing Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ call for an independent investigation into these events.
On the day when 58 Gaza residents were shot dead by Israeli snipers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was welcoming U.S. Middle East Advisor Jared Kushner, his wife Ivanka Trump, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and four U.S. Senators on the occasion of the symbolic opening of a planned United States Embassy in Jerusalem. The embassy will be on land declared neutral in the 1949 armistice agreement and considered by the United Nations to be in occupied Palestine.
Friends are witnesses to these horrific events. Unless we speak out forcefully in protest, we will also be complicit. Removal of people from their land, their confinement in what amounts to a concentration camp, denying them sanitation, adequate health services, and employment, and then systematically killing them when their despair boils over into nonviolent protests all work against the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. Quakers must protest this occupation by demanding that the U.S. government end all military aid to Israel and support international efforts to immediately end the illegal blockade of Gaza. We urge each Monthly Meeting to address this crisis through internal discernment and public activism.
The plea of refugees in Gaza to return to their ancestral villages now in Israel is the central focus of the Great March to Return . It began on April 2, 2018, was planned to end on May 15, but currently (August 15, 2018) is ongoing. These dates mark two important historical events, Land Day when 6 Palestinians were killed as they attempted to return to their villages in 1976, and Nakba Day marking the beginning of The Catastrophe, or the Grand Dispossession in 1948. The violence of this effort—as of August 9, 2018, Israeli army snipers have killed 172 mostly unarmed Palestinians, with 17,504 wounded (more than 1000 of them children), many with life-threatening injuries, overwhelming the already stressed medical system—led to this minute.
We attempted to bring this minute to New England Yearly Meeting (Quaker) Sessions this summer (2018) but because of our working group’s slip up and a packed business agenda, we failed. However, Burlington Monthly Meeting may bring it to its Quarter, “seasoning” it for next year’s NEYM Sessions. We’re also working on a revision (Minute inspired by Burlington Friends’ minute), not yet official from us.
A two-day workshop organized by the NEYM Working Group on Israel-Palestine (With reference to NEYM’s minute on Palestine-Israel passed last summer)
Building a Just Peace in Palestine-Israel
Tuesday, 3:30-5, Leavenworth
John Reuwer and Laurie Gagne (Burlington, VT, MM); Working Group on Israel-Palestine
John and Laurie will have just returned from a month in the West Bank where they deployed with Meta Peace Teams to advance MPT’s vision of seeking “a just world grounded in nonviolence and respect for the sacred interconnectedness of all life.” Their mission is “to pursue peace through active nonviolence” amidst the conflict in occupied Palestine, as part of a growing field of work known as Unarmed Civilian Protection, or Third Party Nonviolent Intervention. (Jeffords 213)
They will report on:
Current conditions of living for Palestinians and interactions with Israeli soldiers.
Prospects for improvements in the social and political situation from the local perspective, including that of Ramallah Friends.
How UCP and TPNI work in theory and in real life, and the potential it may hold for reducing militarism in human affairs.
Moving our Meetings to Take Action on Israel-Palestine
Wednesday, 3:30-5, Leavenworth
Minga Claggett-Borne and Jonathan Vogel-Borne (Cambridge, MA, MM); Working Group on Israel-Palestine
How do we talk to one another about the issue? How do we engage our meetings? Given the urgency of the situation, particularly for the people of Gaza, what do we need in order to take faithful and effective action? What do those actions look like? (Jeffords 213)
(Dating back to late 2014, after a summer of unprecedented violence over Gaza and inspired by a statement from Britain Yearly Meeting in August 2014, Friends Meeting at Cambridge, followed by Salem Quarterly Meeting, and finally the Yearly Meeting itself unites on the following statement.)
Minute 2017-46 Annual Sessions at Castleton, Vermont, August 8, 2017
The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) testimony on peace, justice, and nonviolence is based in our experience of the divine in all of creation and within all persons. Thus, we are deeply troubled by the suffering and injustice caused by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and we are concerned that our government perpetuates that violence by continuing to send billions of dollars of military aid to the region. Continue reading “NEYM unites on a statement about Palestine-Israel”
The New England Yearly Meeting Annual Sessions takes place August 5–10, 2017 at Castleton University, Vermont. Our team is currently planning programs.
WORKSHOPS
Israel, Palestine and New England Yearly Meeting — a two part workshop with Jennifer Bing of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Chicago office — Tuesday & Wednesday, 3:30-5pm
Israel/Palestine flares into the headlines periodically but intense work to resolve issues continues in the background with little notice. This workshop with share some of that work and help move NEYM to finding its voice on the problem. Day One will focus on two AFSC campaigns. “No Way To Treat a Child” has been tracking child detentions and raising these concerns with Congressional leaders and the State Department. “Gaza Unlocked” seeks to draw attention to the ongoing trauma in Gaza as well as the beautiful resilience of the people. Day Two will continue talking about that work as well as explore ways for Meetings and NEYM to have a voice in work for peace with justice. Jennifer Bing from the AFSC will be a resource for this workshop. Continue reading “Plans for NEYM Annual Sessions 2017”