Combating Disfigurations, Part Two

And now for phase Two, the Jewish alternative.

"The Arabs, including and especially the Palestinian Arabs, have been the aggressors throughout the nearly 100 years of the Arab-Israel conflict."

This quote from Rachel Neuwirth's article confirms what I had already suspected about her. She represents a faction of Zionist thought that does not want peace, does not want a resolution, but wants vengance. It is a thought that does not serve Jews or Israelis nor humanity as a whole.

I say this after reading about Jewish approaches to religious peacebuilding and how Jews and Arab Muslims do not have to live in a cycle of violence. There does not have to be a question of a victor or a loser.

Marc Gopin is way cooler than Rachel Neuwirth, and people who want to read about the Jewish side of the conflict should check him out. My favorite piece of his comes from a sort of anthology of religious peacebuilding works entitled Faith Based Diplomacy edited by Douglas Johnston.

He talks about how the intensity of the human despair caused by the violent conflicts trumps the things that caused it. We can point to so many reasons and events that led to the violence, but because the casualties have been so devastating, deconstructing all of that won't really help. Each side's needs are equal to the other in importance.

One of the more creative ideas he has, the land that is fought over so bitterly can be used as a tool in building a relationship between the two sides. One of these ways draws on the shared tradition of memorializing the dead for Jews and Muslims. This should be done via a bilateral process and could be as simple as picking a place where violence has occurred and making it a communal mourning place. But it is something that needs happen organically and over an extended period of time. The absence of judgement is key. The focus needs to be on the loss of life no matter what the reason was.

He also highlights a plan for resolving the conflict. These points include involving religious leaders in the peace process, resotring the sanctity of Holy places, engaging in joint mourning, supporting injured adversaries, develop trust-building initiatives, developing a process for restoring justices, combatting poverty, restoring dignity, and engage religious traditions in transforming relationships.

For a more detailed plan within Jewish theology to fix it all, google him and read whatever you find about him.

Now, I can imagine Mr. Snarfquack reading one or two sentences of all this and ignoring it and quite possibly responding with his pre-scripted diatribe of how I'm no better than a terrorist or Nazi, and that's fine. The world is full of Snarfquacks who are too far into their own perceptions that they can't reason with anything else, and so are consistently irrational in their responses and annoying to everyone else. I wouldn't bother to write so much about all this just because a Snarfquack sent it to my inbox. No, I'm writing all this because I want people to read something level headed and peace oriented on this subject. If all this makes me a Nazi terrorist who drinks the blood of Jewish babies, then the discussion ends and I continue to not care what you think of me.



Because your name is Snarfquack. Fo' realz.

Peace is Crazy, but War is Worse

Tonight's blog post is courtesy of a fascinating Religion and Peacebuilding class lecture/discussion on restorative vs. retributive justice based on our readings from R. Scott Appleby's Ambivalence of the Sacred. So what exactly do they each mean?

The retributive justice definition fits the current US Justice system for adults, but not juveniles. Its focusing is on punishing the perpetrators, taking something away from them. Restorative justice says, "All parties were harmed in this crime, and a right relationship must be restored." Therefore, it is more focused on rehabilitation and making amends. The example that Appleby uses is that of Maha Ghosananda's work after Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia ( Eddie Izzard refers to Pol Pot as a 'genocidal fuckhead').

I'm having a hard time tracking down electronic sources for this, but in class, we talked about how Ghosananda was dedicated to restoring a right relationship in Cambodia, and was not in favor of incarcerating or even executing Pol Pot. In restorative justice, the perpetrator makes amends by giving up something, for Ghosananda it was sufficient for Pol Pot to confess his accountability for the crimes he committed but he would have to remain under house arrest for the safety and harmony of the community. And I just thought....WHAT????

Restorative justice is something very difficult to get my head around, but I am coming to believe in its power, even in cases like Cambodia. So let's say we go back in time and capture Saddam Hussein, we put him on trial to discover the facts of the crimes and he can either concede that he is guilty and offer to make amends, by let's say, giving up all his worldly possessions to the Iraqi people and agreeing to remain under house arrest for the rest of his life, or he can say "I did nothing wrong" and just walk away. Of course, the details of how it could have been done are much much much more complicated, and this whole process would have taken years and years, and he probably wouldn't have confessed. But the idea behind restorative justice says that the community is so dedicated to the idea that when the perpetrator says he's done nothing wrong, you have to let him go, but he goes at his own peril because he will most likely be expelled from society. It is a lofty goal, to have a society that so condemns violence that it will not lift a finger even against its violent enemies, but I think its worthy one, and even if it is ultimately unattainable in this life, we should still go for it. But of course, this doesn't mean we do away with policing, we just reform how the police are supposed to operate.

This is a very brief and feeble explanation of restorative justice, but it adequately explains my thoughts for the day. It remains a topic to be better explored.