What is your emotional response to the Middle East conflict?
I have been exposing myself, failing and learning, as a bystander of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
From my Jewish ancestors who died in the holocaust, I learnt how important it is to stand up to oppression. From my German ancestors who were in Berlin during the second world war, I learnt to be an Active Bystander, not a passive one. From my English ancestors I learnt about the sins of being a coloniser, oppressor and unconsciously racist.
I try to stand in the world as an active peacemaker, but as well as trying (and failing sometimes) to express love to all parties, I also need to speak to the truth about injustice. I am learning how to do it in a way that people can hear, rather than closing and shouting back. If people cannot hear me, why speak at all? So I am on a journey of learning how to have a voice and to be heard.
Do you fight (argue), flight (keep quiet), freeze (ignore/dissociate) or fawn (be the nice guy/gal) when engaged in or watching the Middle East conflict?
How can you centre yourself?
What do you stand for?
I love the quotation below:
Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity.
It is the act of interrupting injustice
without mirroring injustice,
the act of disarming evil
without destroying the evildoer,
the act of finding a third way
that is neither fight nor flight
but the careful, arduous pursuit
of reconciliation and justice.
It is about a revolution of love
that is big enough to set both
the oppressed and the oppressors free.”
Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove