Letters - 25 February 2011
From supporting both sides to surveying the business method
Supporting both sides
I think Simon Gray is right in principle but wrong in practice (Supporting both sides, 18 February). I make sure I buy no goods from Israel unless I know that they have not been produced on stolen land. This usually means buying olive oil through my Meeting grown by Palestinian farmers committed to peace.
If you go into a shop where you know some, most even, of the goods are genuine but some are stolen, what do you do? Do you shop regardless and walk away from the implied support you are giving to the thieves? Or do you boycott the shop completely thereby denying the genuine producer of his or her living? I choose to buy, but only those goods I know not to have been stolen or unacceptably produced. If Israeli producers want to sell to me they will have to show me that they produce their goods in ethical and legitimate ways. As they do not I do not buy them; as I refused to buy South African goods during the apartheid years. Just as we demand ethical standards in our investments we should demand ethical standards in the goods we buy.
Yes, we are committed to promoting peace and justice. We will not do so, however, by supporting one side or the other, but by refusing to choose sides and insisting we only do commercial business with those, like Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam, who see an Israel/Palestine without sides. Perhaps such a boycott might motivate those within Israel and the Occupied Territories to give Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam, or a similar organisation, a role in certifying products as legitimately produced. It would provide a real opportunity to promote peace through enhancing the economic power of the proponents of peace rather than war.
Jim Paris
I would like to thank Simon Gray for his ‘opinion’ article, which stimulated me to examine the issues raised by Quaker Peace & Social Witness (QPSW). There are two points relating to the article that I would like to make. The first concerns a boycott. As stated in the minutes of Meeting for Sufferings (MfS), Britain Yearly Meeting through the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme (EAPPI) already advocates a boycott of settlement goods and appropriate labelling to enable this to be done. QPSW asked MfS, as representatives of their Meetings, to reaffirm our commitment to the EAPPI; to endorse the position on settlement products; and to encourage study and action by local Meetings. This seems to me to be an entirely justified item to be considered by MfS. I can understand that unity was not achieved on a response to the Kairos Palestine document, in which patriarchs and heads of churches in Jerusalem call for ‘a system of economic sanctions and boycott to be applied against Israel’, for this is a step beyond boycotting settlement products and has many ramifications.
The second point that I would make concerns the support of both sides – where by ‘both sides’ I mean their peacemakers. EAPPI already works with both Palestinian and Israeli peace groups. My local Meeting supports the work of B’Tselem, the respected Israeli organisation monitoring human rights violations in the occupied territories. However, successive Israeli governments have shown little real interest in achieving a viable two-state solution. The situation in this part of the Middle East is said to be ‘complex’, but it is not – at its heart is the continued multiplication and expansion of Israeli settlements recognised as illegal under international law.
In his 2010 book Israel and Palestine, Oxford historian Avi Shlaim points out that, following the 1967 invasion of the West Bank and Gaza, ‘for the first time in its history Israel had something concrete to offer the Arabs in return for recognition and peace. But Israel preferred land to peace. Within a matter of months after the guns fell silent, Israel began to build civilian settlements in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel became a colonial power’…This colonial settlement building has continued ever since. The rejection by the Israeli government of the US offer of substantial aid and support in return for a twelve week extension to the ‘construction freeze’ to allow peace talks to continue, and the frenzied building programme since, speaks for itself. It is unjust and in contravention of international law for Israel to continue to build settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem on Palestinian land, and to offer significant financial inducements to Jews to live there.
For Christmas I was given a book by Raja Shehadeh entitled Palestinian Walks – notes on a vanishing landscape, which was winner of the Orwell Prize in 2008. Written by a man who loves the country, he takes the reader on walks through the land and country around Ramallah as it changes. It is hard not to weep with him.
So, should we be neutral? I cannot but echo the words of Desmond Mpilo Tutu: ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’ I leave you to decide if there is injustice, who is the oppressor, and what you wish to do about it.
Brian Wardrop
The music of the spheres
I thank AM Rossett (4 February) for reminding us of the Pythagorean discovery of the mathematical foundation of sound (music) and the subsequent development of that concept in some Renaissance architecture. But AM Rossett didn’t stop there. The whole of this space-time bubble that is the universe, and in which ‘we live and move and have our being’, is created on that same ‘mathematical’ foundation, which we choose to call God or Allah and so on, or the Holy Spirit or Life Force or Love emanating from that concept. Whatever you call it does not in any way alter its fundamental nature which is to provide for everything within the space-time bubble. For me neither theist nor non-theist are ultimate concepts nor even words that move me. They are just stages on our respective spiritual journeys.
For Christians and Jews the word God is used to denote an understanding that is indescribable in human language; but plenty of people have made the mistake of trying to describe it in too limiting a fashion both before the Greek philosophers and since.
The beauty of the Quaker Way is that we claim not to be tied to anybody’s description. This is difficult as we are born into and conditioned by a Christian culture, but our testimonies are always expressed in ‘today’s’ language, whatever century that may be. For the peace testimony it is not so much to the words of George Fox that we resort, but to the Spirit which caused them to be expressed, to the ‘music of the spheres’, to the fundamental nature of the universe, even to the message of the snowdrops on the lawn at Ettington. And we each hear that message with all our idiosyncrasies, yet moulded to give corporate expression … but without ‘middle management’ stifling the beauty of the natural rhythm of the music. Well, OK, even the Quaker world isn’t perfect!
Gerald Drewett
Boycotting the census
The costs of the forthcoming census are estimated at £482 million. The American company, Lockheed Martin (LM) are being given £150m to run it. LM not only make Trident nuclear missiles, cluster bombs and F-11 jets but they also do eighty per cent of their work for the USA defence department and are involved in surveillance and data processing for the CIA and FBI. LM has also provided private contract interrogators to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
All American companies are subject to the Patriot Act, which allows the US government to have access to any data in the company’s possession. This should be of deep concern to us all. If the census goes ahead run by this company, it will give the American government access to detailed and personal data on the whole of the UK’s entire population.
I ask our leaders to look again at their decision. I believe that we should not give this contract to these warmongers; if we continue to do so we should boycott the census.
Dai Jenkins
Next month sees the 2011 census. Lockheed Martin, a major US arms manufacturer, has the contract to data process and analyse the census information. As a Friend and an absolute pacifist, I will not be taking part in the census. I am aware of the financial penalty I am likely to incur for my conscientious stand.
I am aware that the census is an important way of gathering information so that governments can make fiscal plans. However, I am also aware that no government since 1801, the year of the first census, has ever sought to use the census data to genuinely address social inequalities from then until now.
Gerard Bane
Worship and our Business Method
Following correspondence on the topic of our Business Method, I invite readers to contribute to a simple survey of our approach to upholding clerks, minuting and decision-making, drawing on their experience of any Meetings engaged in Quaker business – large or small, local or national.
This survey forms part of a one-year research project based at Woodbrooke and is funded by an Eva Koch award. Its aim is to make the service of clerking a more widely understood, supported and celebrated aspect of our faith and practice.
I’m also undertaking a separate survey and interviews with clerks. So the intention of this one is for any Friends, whether newcomers to Business Meetings or people very familiar with them, to contribute a ‘snapshot’ of one. Anyone who is interested please contact me for a short questionnaire.
Jane Mace,
Eva Koch scholar 2011
Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, 1046 Bristol Road, Birmingham B29 6LJ
