Letters - 02 September 2022
From Halt these wars to Why Israel
Halt these wars
How should I respond as a Quaker to the ‘culture war’, and ‘war on woke’, seemingly the most pressing issues for the government and some media at present? This preference for ‘war’ is dangerously close to going beyond metaphor. Hatred and insecurity are being weaponised, and the manufacturers of these weapons are making profits in their political gains or newspaper sales. There are victims in the targeted minorities who are suffering, and the ties that hold society together are being damaged. Enemies are being made of fundamental values, justice and human rights in which our Quaker testimonies are rooted. It is easy to belittle commitments to the climate and anti-racism if ‘justice’ is seen negatively. ‘Woke’ is a device designed to wreck positive change.
Complexity requires hard work, but we can find peaceful ways to live with the tensions and frictions of the social and generational changes that constitute the battlegrounds in this conflict. My faith leads me to oppose these wars and promote the disarmament of the weapons in use, counterposing love and tolerance to hatred and prejudice. Our actions can halt these wars now. Otherwise, we will spend years clearing-up the personal and social wreckage.
Mark Lilley
Peace packs
I was intrigued to read that Celia’s granddaughter had been required to join the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) at her school in order to complete an A level (19 August). This prompted me to look into which schools in 2022 still have CCFs let alone maintain an element of compulsion about them. My online searching suggests they are all fee paying and independent. Judging from their prospectuses the CCF is invariably promoted as a key component of the ethos of those schools. Presumably, parents choose to pay to send their children to these schools in the full knowledge that they will be exposed to the Ministry of Defence’s youth policy as quoted by Celia to ‘create the conditions whereby recruiting will flourish’. Presumably too, they could choose, if they so wished, not to send their children to this type of school. Do Friends know of any state schools with CCFs?
Over fifty years ago I attended a state grammar school with a CCF. By the time I joined aged fifteen it was no longer compulsory, it was never a short cut to A levels and it was disbanded towards the end of my time at school. I never felt under any peer or parental pressure to join and I threw myself enthusiastically into everything it had to offer, likewise gaining my three stripes. I don’t think any of us were under any illusion as to its real purpose which was to help recruitment into the military, in our case as potential future officers. From time to time we would team up with real boy soldiers from the local Junior Leaders Regiment which existed to produce and train future NCOs. For us middle-class grammar school boys this was probably the most salutary life experience of being a cadet. Now as a sixty-nine-year-old Quaker looking back, I wonder if the Teach Peace Pack had been around then would it have influenced my decision to ‘join-up’? How much impact would it have on my fifteen-year-old-self looking for adventure? I like to think I would have taken all of its messages on board but I reckon I probably would have still ‘put my army head on’, just like Celia’s granddaughter.
I am curious to know what has been the uptake of the Pack. For example, what traction has it had in schools with CCFs? Is there any data on this? And, as one of the key decisions to expose children to creeping militarisation in these schools seems to lie with parents, is there a case for a peace pack for parents too?
Robert Parkes
Meeting for Worship
The exclusion of the word ‘worship’ from Meeting house notice boards reflects the marginalisation of theocratic language within Britain Yearly Meeting (19 August). I appreciate the concern to be inclusive and thereby avoid excluding those for whom ‘God talk’ does not resonate. However, on the point of inclusivity, I wonder where this process leaves those who feel a deep sense of affinity with the faith perspective upon which our corporate life is traditionally based.
In my experience faith and practice are co-dependent. The experience of the gathered Meeting seems to be lost if our worship becomes detached from the faith perspective in which it is grounded. There are also implications for Meeting for Worship for business which seems to become an exercise in consensus decision making rather than discernment. How likely is it that we can be a coherent faith community if we minimise our theocratic origins in order to attract those who are unlikely to be in unity with the Quaker concept of worship, based as it is on ‘the belief that we can recognise the will of God through the discipline of silent waiting’(Quaker faith & practice, 3.02)?
Richard Pashley
An amazing summer
It has been an amazing summer in Malvern. Here in the hot weather the outdoor space has been full of highly active children chasing, footballing, skateboarding, playing with sand and water. Last Monday our worshipping space was full of youngsters Lego building, playing snap, table tennis, reading…
I think several miracles were involved. Firstly, that these children and their mothers had safely arrived from Ukraine and had been offered homes by local people. Secondly, that all our play materials had been donated by friends, neighbours and strangers using Freecycle. Thirdly, that this elderly Meeting had, three times a week since June, set up all the play facilities and supervised the children so that they may play safely, and then, exhausted, had tidied away, swept and vacuumed and left the space ready for Meeting. Oh yes, and there were homemade cakes each afternoon!
A huge thank you and well done to everyone who supported this initiative, gave the children such fun and the mothers a break to attend English classes on site.
Liz Flanagan
Why Israel
In reply to Ol Rappaport (19 August) and the question ‘Why only Israel?’, the answer seems clear to me and many others like me with Jewish heritage/family connections (or without), and I have visited Israel and the West Bank.
Firstly, despite the controversial history and at the risk of oversimplification, British Quakers are right to produce corporate responses to certain actions of the state of Israel because Britain bears a heavy responsibility, with the Balfour declaration of 1917, of initiating events in Palestine which resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 by force of arms. Britain’s secretive foreign policy during and after the first world war played off Arabs against Jews. It failed to resolve the increasingly violent conflicts between them, and also between them separately and the British. These mainly arose from an inconsistent policy allowing a large increase in Jewish immigration into the region against the wishes and fears of the indigenous Arabs.
In 1948, Britain, exhausted by the second world war and the prospect of an end to its colonial empire, abandoned its Mandate for Palestine and left it to the recently formed United Nations to unsuccessfully resolve the situation. So in 1948 the Arabs experienced the disaster of the ‘Palestinian Catastrophe’ (Nakba) while the Jews had the triumph of ‘the war of independence’. Secondly, Israel is regarded by itself and its allies as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. Its government should therefore be severely held to account, especially by Britain, and in accordance with both International law and the laudable democratic values expressed by Israel itself in its 1948 ‘Declaration of Independence’, for its continuing discriminatory policies and disproportionate and destructive actions against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. These have been repeatedly and extensively documented by the UN, Amnesty International and others, including Israeli human rights organisations. The British government has failed dismally for decades in taking any effective action in this regard. By the way, since 24 February Quakers have also corporately issued statements concerning the Russian invasion of, and the terrible war in, Ukraine.
Mike Pozner
Comments
Michael Pozner’s summarises the history of Israel succinctly, I too condemned Israel’s action in the first sentence of my letter. But he doesn’t address my question “Why only Israel?”
Perhaps I should have capitalised it “Why ONLY Israel?”
He is right in correcting me that “Quakers have also corporately issued statements concerning the Russian invasion of, and the terrible war in, Ukraine.” I thought I had edited my letter to include that, but I must have dreamt that bit.
The BYM statement was issued on the day of the invasion. In the six months since a catalogue of war crimes has been uncovered for the world to see. But there has been no subsequent statement from BYM on the actions of Russia in targeting civilians, children, hospitals and schools, systematic rape and torture that has been revealed since then, compared to the very specific way that the article in The Friend (4 August) criticises Israeli actions in Gaza.
By Ol Rappaport on 1st September 2022 - 9:46
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