"PALESTINE"

 “PALESTINE”

Sometime this summer – indeed many times this summer – dust will begin swirling in west Africa to form a whirlwind.  Those  winds will move off the mainland and combine together with the warm Atlantic waters to form a system, which with the right conditions, will become a tropical storm and then a hurricane in the western hemisphere.  In many ways, this describes the long and painful history of Palestine.  The ashes, the dust, of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Europe have combined with the ashes of the victims of the “Nakba,” the disastrous eviction of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948, to form a geopolitical storm of hurricane proportions in the modern world.  

In this short space, there is no way to give anything approaching a full account of how this hurricane developed, but it is important to name some briefly.  Last week I looked at the Jewish side of the equation, the long and terrible history of anti-Judaism in world history, a history that led to the establishment of a modern day Israel in territory approximating the former borders of the reign of King David.

    This week is a short review of Palestinians.  That word “Palestine” itself points to the difficulties.  It was used by the Romans to describe the current territory in question in the Middle East, and the root of the word “Palestine,” comes from the Greek word for “Philistia,” who were the ancient Biblical enemies of Israel, the enemies who captured the Ark in Judges 6 that led to the rise of Samuel.  The Philistines were an enemy so strong that not even the great King David could subdue them.  

In the late 1800’s, Jewish leaders worked hard in Britain to get support for a state of Israel in the territories of Palestine, formerly occupied by the biblical Israel.  The work paid off in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Great Britain expressed support for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East.  After the Ottoman Empire collapsed as a result of World War I, the British Mandate was developed, and Britain colonized Palestine, with the intention of moving towards the development of a homeland for Jewish people there.  As the British who came to the Americas discovered, however, there were people already living in the lands being discussed.  In the Middle East, these people continued to be called by their ancient name:  “Palestinians.”  They were mostly Arabs, all seeking to develop a new political entity after the Ottomans had been defeated.  

After the stunning and horrific slaughter of Jews and other persons by the Nazis in World War II, the British and the West made a fateful decision:  the British Mandate in Palestine would end on May 14, 1948, and a new Jewish state of Israel would be created in that territory.  All during the 30 years of the British Mandate, there had been guerilla warfare in Palestine between Arabs and Jews for control of the territories, much of it similar to the Kansas-Nebraska wars in the 1850’s in the USA over slavery, prior to the Civil War.  Slaughters on both sides occurred, but as the date moved closer, the Jewish military power began to dominate in the killing and evictions of Palestinian people.  

    An all-out Arab-Israeli war broke out in 1947-48, with disasters similar to the white Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the Wilmington Coup of 1898 happening in Palestine.  Preparations were made for a transfer of political power from Britain to Israel, and on May 15, 1948, the transfer was made, and this date in Palestinian history is known as “Nakba.”  The word “Nakba” means “disaster” or “catastrophe,” for it marked the Western world’s endorsement of the killing and the displacement of Palestinian people from their homeland.  Methods similar to those used by the American government to remove Native Americans from their homelands were used to remove Palestinians from their homeland.  An estimated 750,000 people were removed from their homes, with no compensation.

Ever since then, Palestinian peoples have been refugees seeking a homeland.  This predicament was brought home most clearly to me when Caroline and I were pastors at Oakhurst, and the Rev. Dr. Fahed Abu-Akel came to talk with us about the Palestinian crisis.  He is a friend and is a former Moderator of our Presbyterian denomination.  In his presentation, he noted that he was a Palestinian Christian, and that his family had been one of those removed from the homeland by the Israeli army in its drive to create the modern state of Israel.  He spoke profoundly about the great suffering of his family and of so many others.  He is a powerful resource on the issues of Palestine and Israel. If you’d like to contact him,  his e-mail is fabuakel@gmail.com.

The Palestinian people are without a country and have no land to call their own.  There have been various coalitions built among them to seek a homeland – from the PLO to the Palestinian Authority to Hamas – and there have been both non-violent and violent responses to the Israeli occupation of their land.  The Palestinian resistance led to the building of the walls in Israel, especially in Jerusalem.  There is growing oppression of the Palestinians, and those Palestinian homeowners who remain in Israel routinely have their land taken by Jewish settlers.  In a true and deeply sad irony, the oppressed have become the oppressors.  As I noted last week, it is easy to hear the lament of Jesus from Luke’s gospel:  “O Jerusalem, would that you knew the things that make for peace.  But even now they are hidden from your eyes.”  So, it seems currently – is there no just peace for Jerusalem, for Jews and Palestinians?  It is hard to discern a way forward without continuing war, but next week, I will seek to suggest a path.  

"O, JERUSALEM"

 “O, JERUSALEM”

In early summer of 1967, after my junior year in college, I was preparing to take an extended trip out west with a college buddy, Sidney Cassell.  Sidney was from Tunica, Mississippi, and his was the only Jewish family in Tunica.  His family ran a small motel called the Tunica Motel.  This was decades before Tunica became one of the most popular casino sites in the country. It is about 30 miles from Helena, across the Mississippi River.  It was going to be a great adventure for us. We were scheduled to leave on June 6, leaving for Oklahoma that day, then Amarillo, then Albuquerque, then Las Vegas, then on to the great state of California, places where neither of us had been.

But, on June 5, Israel launched its Six Day War against Egypt and Syria, and the world held its breath as the superpowers lined up on each side.  Sidney called me that day from Tunica to tell me that we might have to put off our trip or even cancel it altogether.  American Jews had been put on notice to be prepared to defend Israel, and Sidney was planning to go to Israel to join the Israeli army, if he was needed.  He told me:  “I must defend Jerusalem and my homeland.”  I was shocked, and I replied:  “Mississippi is your homeland, though a crummy one it is.”  “No,” he said, “I live in Mississippi – Israel is my homeland.”  For the first time, I got a glimpse into the meaning of Jerusalem and Israel for Jews all over the world.  Up until that moment, I had not adequately understood the depth of commitment expressed by the Psalmist:  “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!  Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.”  (Ps. 137)

     Israel obliterated the Arab forces in 6 days, recaptured the divided Jerusalem, and set up the current configurations which still make peace so elusive in the Middle East.  Sidney and I made our trip out west, and it was a great and growing time.  His loyalty to Israel has lingered with me over these 50+ years, and it helps me to understand the deep commitment to Israel.  I also understand the deep anti-Judaism that resides in the world, but especially in the West.  There were a significant number of Jewish families in Helena, where I grew up, enough to have a synagogue and a rabbi at that time.  My mother did the hair of many Jewish women in her beauty shop, and I knew Jewish students at our segregated school.  I breathed in the anti-Judaism, however, and as I have written in two of my books, on one occasion I came home to tell my mother that I hated Jews.  She asked me:  “Nibs, why do you hate Jews?” “I just do, Momma, they’re bad people,” was my unconsidered reply.  “Nibs, do you hate Rayman?”  “No, Momma,” I replied, “he’s my friend.”  She came back, “What about Ruth, do you hate her?”  “No, Momma, she’s nice – she’s a girl, but she’s nice.”  Mother then said, “Well, Nibs, they both are Jewish.  Do you hate them?”  I was astonished and perplexed and replied: “Wow, Mother, you are kidding.  They are Jews?”  She laughed and said, “Of course they are, Nibs, you better be careful about how you start grouping people to hate.”  

That lesson has stayed with me.  I did not know any people of Arab or Palestinian descent as I grew up.  I sort of lumped them in with Jewish people in my childhood sorting of groups and racial classifications.  I learned much later that we did have at least one prominent Arab family in Helena.  There was a famous drug store/lunch counter/pharmacy on Main Street that many people patronized.  It was called “Habby’s,” spelled Habib’s.  When my longtime friend David Billings came back to the Delta to do some anti-racism training, he was accompanied by a fellow trainer who was Arab-American.  As they were driving through Helena, David pointed to Habby’s and noted that it was where his dad used to eat lunch on his breaks from his accounting firm.  His friend laughed and replied and said “That’s not Habby’s – that’s Habeeb’s – you all mispronounced his name all those years – I’ll bet that family is from Lebanon.” And, sure enough they were.  When David told me that story, I remembered again how much racism was imbedded in our souls, and how much people who were not classified as “white” had to shrink and be careful around those of us who were classified as “white.”

I have great sympathy for Israel, and as I noted last week, I have a tiny bit of understanding as to why the nation of Israel is so determined to maintain itself and to seek to recover its “old” borders.  It took me a lot longer to discover Palestinians, and I will write next week about that discovery, one which astonished me and which also reminded me of how provincial my upbringing had been.  

In the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to seek to turn the corner on the God movement that he has started, but near the city, he pauses and has these words to say:  “O Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing…..O Jerusalem, would that even today you knew the things that make for peace.  But, now they are hidden from your eyes.”  

    As Israel and Hamas fight it out again, I am also reminded of how much a conundrum Palestine and Israel are.  The Israelis still smell the ovens of Europe, and the Palestinians were driven off their land in order to make the modern nation of Israel.  The Palestinians have no homeland, and Israel seems to have accepted the idea that apartheid is necessary in order to maintain itself.  And, of course, in Jerusalem itself, the third holiest site in Islam, the mosque al-Aqsa where Mohammed took flight to Allah, sits on top of the holiest site in Judaism, the Western wall or the Wailing Wall.  It is all that is left of the Temple destroyed by the Romans 20 centuries ago.  Jerusalem does not seem to know the things that make for peace, but we’ll explore this difficult landscape over the next two blogs.  

"SO MANY ANNIVERSARIES"

 “SO MANY ANNIVERSARIES”

This week in May brings so many anniversaries!  Caroline and I got married 47 years ago on May 18 on a hot Saturday afternoon in 1974, in an outdoor wedding in Decatur, Georgia.  We had met in the spring of 1973 in Nashville when Caroline attended the wedding of Robin and Linda Williams in a communal house where I was living with some other folks, including my longtime friend Harmon Wray and Robin’s cousin Les Davis. Caroline was friends with Murphy Davis, Les’ sister (and Robin’s cousin also), and she accompanied Murphy to Nashville to attend the wedding.  I had completed my CO in late 1972 and was seeking to discern my next steps, trying to decide whether to go back to seminary.

My friend Ed Loring was then on the faculty of Columbia Seminary in Decatur, and he had been urging me to resume my seminary career and to do it at Columbia.  Caroline and I had gotten along quite well at our meeting in Nashville, and since she lived in the Atlanta area, that was also a drawing card to go to Columbia.  She has always wanted to make it quite clear that we did not meet at Columbia, and that is true.  She had already graduated from Columbia and was already ordained as a pastor, serving as an associate campus minister at Georgia Tech.   She was the 21at woman ordained as a pastor in the PCUS, the former Southern Presbyterian Church. 

    We started dating when I moved to Atlanta in the summer of 1973, and we got married the next year.  Caroline and I would later become the first clergy couple to serve in a local church together in the PCUS.  We were called to a small church in Norfolk, Virginia, where the church had only 12 members but had the potential for a huge community ministry because it was located in a 5,000 resident low-income apartment complex.  It would begin a long career for us of working together as a clergy couple and serving in urban churches.  

    This time period has many anniversaries in it, including the 67th anniversary of the 9-0 SCOTUS decision in Brown. V. Board of Education, which overruled segregation in public education facilities on May 17, 1954.  That decision itself overturned the May 18, 1896 8-1 SCOTUS decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that established segregation and neo-slavery as the law of the land.  So, yes, our wedding anniversary is the same day as Plessy v. Ferguson, which I did not know at the time of our wedding.  Our country is still in the battle between those two powerful SCOTUS decisions – our white-dominated society is still not sure if we want to provide quality education to Black and Brown kids, and the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol was year another blow in that struggle.  

There are a couple of other anniversaries in this week: May 14 was the anniversary of the landing of the Anglo settlers in the land that would become Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 – more on that in another blog.  As the war between Israel and Hamas rages right now,  I am reminded that on this date 73 years ago in 1948, the nation of Israel drove Palestinian natives off their land to establish the modern nation of Israel.   I have no quarrels with the existence of the state of Israel, or with their persistent and insistent quality of maintaining the state of Israel.  Although Israel and Judaism are not the same,  modern Israel exists because they can still smell the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau.  They rightly know that they cannot trust the West, or anyone else for that matter, to stand up for Judaism.  They must be the ones to enforce “Never Again.”  They look like they intend to do it, or to make the world pay a great price if it seeks to return to the Germanic approach of the 1930’s and 40’s.

            Yet, today the democratic nation of Israel looks more like apartheid South Africa or the white South in which I grew up in the 1940’s and 50’s.   The day of May 14, 1948, Palestinians call “Nakba,” an Arabic word for “catastrophe.”  It marks 73 years since the Israelis drove the Palestinians from their homes and off their land, never to return again.  Buildings burned and houses razed, and now non-Arab Israelis moving into those places.  I wish that I could say that justice will be served, but I’m sitting on my porch right now in Decatur, sitting on land once occupied and owned by Muscogee Creek people, removed themselves by President and Presbyterian Andrew Jackson.

So, this is a big week of anniversaries – I give thanks for my spouse and partner in ministry Susan Caroline Leach.  It has been quite a trip!  I also give thanks for Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall and Barbara Johns and Chief Justice Earl Warren who got SCOTUS to the Brown decision.  Yet, I’m also aware of the continuing and powerful forces of death and destruction that continue to occupy us – in our native land, in Palestine, in Israel.  May we find our places in the cloud of witnesses who have walked and talked and kept our minds stayed on justice.

"ASIAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE"

 “ASIAN-AMERICAN HERITAGE”

The official celebration of Asian-American Heritage began in May, 1979.  It began as a week of celebration and has now expanded to a month.  The month of May was chosen to commemorate the immigration of the first Japanese to the USA in 1843 and to remember the work of the Chinese workers on the Transcontinental Railroad, which was completed in May, 1869.   In the evolving American system of race, people of Asian descent have not reached “ethnic” status as people of Hispanic/Latinx have.  So, they are still classified as a “race,” even though no one really fits under that oppressive word, designed by Anglo men to be able to exploit labor and lands as those who were on top of the racial ladder. 

The recent killing of Asian-American women in Atlanta is a reminder of the deadly power of race in American culture.  A young man classified as “white” blamed Asian-American women for his sexual addiction, and rather than seeking a group to help him cope with his addiction, he decided to seek to eliminate what he took to be the source of the problem.  He saw Asian-American women as the “other,” as the enemy.  There is an enraging and long history of this kind of treatment of people of Asian heritage in USA, from the Chinese Exclusion Acts to the Japanese internment camps of WW II to the blaming of Asian-Americans for Covid, leading to many random vicious attacks. 

    Because the system of race has so long focused on Black and white issues, it is not clear where Americans of Asian heritage fit into the system.  Using Isabel Wilkerson’s category of “caste,”  people of Asian heritage would be considered in “the middle caste,”  not quite Black but certainly not white.  We had a few Asian families in my small hometown of Helena, Arkansas, and in our separatist school system, they went to the “white” school.  At that time, people categorized as “Asian” were seen as descendants of what we then called “Far-East Asia,” such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vientamese.  As far as I can recall, we had no families of Indian or Pakistani or Sri Lankan heritage in Helena, but they now are incorporated into the category of “Asian.”

    Asian-Americans present a profound problem for the system of race, because many of them routinely beat those classified as “white” on national test scores for academia and research. If those classified as “white” are superior to all other racial categories, then why do Asian-Americans score higher on the intelligence tests?  Indeed two years ago, some Trumpsters brought charges against Harvard for discriminating against Asian-American applicants, in order to let “less worthy” people classified as “Black” into the university.  The federal judge wisely saw that this was a Trojan horse for an attack on what is left of affirmative action, and they dismissed the suit.  

    I noted at the Post Office last week that a stamp had been produced with the name and likeness of Chien-Shiung Wu, and because of my white provincialism, I had never heard of her.  She was a physicist born in China who later came to USA.  Her intellect and development as a critical thinker was encouraged by both her parents, especially her father in China. When she came to this country,  she was somewhat shocked at the system of “inferiority” of women that she encountered in USA.  She came to the University of Michigan in 1936 to get her doctorate degree, but she  was appalled when she learned that at Michigan, women were not allowed to use the front entrance of the physics department.  She decided to transfer to University of California Berkeley, where women’s work in physics was more accepted.  She got her PhD there and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, but despite their “liberal” approach, U-C Berkeley would not hire her on the faculty as a woman physics professor.

    She decided to go back to China to teach there, but World War II intervened, and she stayed in the States, teaching at various universities before being hired for the faculty of Columbia University.  While she was there, she became involved with the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb.  Her work helped to develop the capacity to separate uranium into various isotopes so that it could be used to create the bomb.  Like many of those who worked on the Manhattan Project, she came to regret her work on it, but her work there helped to develop a vision of how to make things work in physics.  Indeed, during the late 20th century, Dr. Wu continued to be seen as the top experimental physicist in the world, and many physicists asked for her guidance in proving certain hypotheses that they held.  She died in NYC in 1997, having been recognized as one of the great physicists of the century.  Having become an American citizen in 1954, she is now known as a great American of Asian heritage.

TRAPPED IN THE BEDROOM"

 “TRAPPED IN THE BEDROOM!”

I mused in last year’s Mother’s day blog that I was thinking of doing a memoir on my mother raising me as a single mom in the 1940’s and 50’s.  I have been working on that memoir in the year since, and here is the beginning of that book, as a tribute to my mother and as a tribute, to all people, women and men, who have nurtured us and loved us into adulthood, who have given us mothering love.

    “It is one of my earliest memories.  I am trapped in our bedroom in our small home on Porter Street  in Helena, Arkansas.  I say that I was “trapped” because it felt like that to me at a young age of four.  It was in a hot, sticky room on a Sunday afternoon, with both doors  shut.  It was summer in the Mississippi River delta in 1951 – hot and muggy, no air conditioning, only a small rotating fan, whirring on the dresser, trying to draw me some cool air.  I had been ordered by my mother to take a nap, and failing that, ordered to lie there quietly until she opened the door to tell me that I could get up and play.  At least I had open windows on three sides of the room – to the east was the Mississippi River a mile away.  To the south was our backyard, where I longed to go and play in the fifty yards or so of ground before the steep climb began to Crowley’s Ridge;  to the north was a window to the screen porch, where we would often go sit in the evenings to seek to cool off and get relief from the stifling heat.

    On this particular afternoon, though, these windows were not welcome entries into relief but rather reminders that I was trapped by my tyrannical mother, who refused to allow me to get up and play until she gave me permission.  I fumed and tossed and turned, waiting for the excruciating time to be ended.  In my fuming on that hot Sunday afternoon in 1951,  I had no idea of the depth of the story that underlay my confinement.  It would take me decades to learn the depths and nuances of that story, but for now I will say that my mother worked six days a week as a beautician in someone else’s shop.  The only time that she had to take a nap and rest during those grinding days was on Sunday afternoons, after attending church and Sunday school and eating Sunday dinner.  

    I grew up fatherless in a patriarchal world.  My father, for whom I was named, had abandoned me (and my mother) for another woman before I was a year old.  I was born in Memphis, and after my father left, we lived there for a time.  We lived with an Irish woman, and she kept me while my mother worked as a beauty operator.  This Irish woman nicknamed me “Nibs,” using  an Irish word for the British aristocracy, who consider themselves to be the center of the world – “his Nibs” and “her Nibs.”  That appellation is even heard on occasion now to refer to the Queen of England in an affectionate way.  I have come to use “Nibs” as my primary name – one of the great ironies of that development is that I don’t know the name of the Irish woman who named me.  My mother told me, but I have simply forgotten it.

    I may be projecting onto to my mother a sense of shock and loss in my father’s departure – for reasons that will become clearer, we never talked much about him or his departure.  Undoubtedly, she felt loss, and undoubtedly, we were poor.  She was looking for shelter.  She would find shelter with her grandmother’s sister, Bernice Brown Higgins, who had recently been widowed, and Mrs. Higgins needed fiscal and physical companionship in her small home on Porter Street in Helena.  

    It is not surprising that these two women, my mother and Mrs. Higgins (whom I called “Gran”) pooled their resources in Helena to create a new household.  We moved from Memphis sometime in my second year to live with Gran on Porter Street in a green clapboard house facing the north.  That small home - two bedrooms, one small bath, a combined living and dining room, an average sized kitchen and a wonderful back porch and spacious side porch – would become my constant and stable home until I left for college in 1964.  It was in the east bedroom of that house where I would find myself confined on that hot, sticky afternoon in 1951, fidgeting while my mother sought some rest from the grind of her life, on the couch in the living/dining area.  I would come back often to this home until my mother’s death in 2004.

  I was raised by these two women, who taught me perseverance, humor and compassion.  I am writing this book in praise of my mother, who raised me and formed me and gave me my character.  Two women stand out in this pantheon: Gran, who became grandmother to me even though she was my great-grandmother’s sister.. And most of all, my powerful and determined mother, Mary Elizabeth Armour Stroupe, who dedicated her life to me so that I might find life.  She stood no taller than five feet at her tallest, but she was a giant in my life, and as I later found out, in the lives of others."