Musings

Palestine, Israel, and Us

 
As a citizen of the United States, I am implicated in today’s horror in Israel and Gaza.  The pain and heartbreak and fear and suffering are overwhelming.  I voted for the president who is now supplying weapons for the conflict.  So I have a responsibility to know what is going on, and to exert my small measure of influence for the cause of peace and justice.
 
Hamas murdered hundreds of Israeli citizens point-blank and fired thousands of missiles indiscriminately.  Israel is now killing hundreds of civilians in Gaza from the air, while aiming at Hamas leaders and fighters. 
 
There is no way to justify what Hamas did.  Of course there is justification for Israel to defend itself from the perpetrators.
 
But the question is how.
 
St. Augustine, the Christian theologian of 4^th – 5^th century Rome, came up with a moral calculus to apply to war.  Obviously, he said it should be assiduously avoided.  But where that was not possible, it ought to be proportional to the threat and should only be pursued if there is a reasonable probability of success.  Otherwise, it devolves into mayhem to no good end.
 
And that’s the real risk in Israel/Palestine today.  We as Americans are party to this conflict, because of our very close alliance with Israel.  So we have a responsibility both to defend Israel and to press vigorously for humane treatment of civilians. 
 
It is justifiable for Israel to defeat utterly the forces that inflicted such genocidal barbarity on its people.  But is that possible to achieve fully without a huge number of civilian deaths and injuries?  Asking a million people to leave their homes in a very short time means death for many of the most vulnerable.  Rooting out militants dug into a densely populated area could kill countless civilians and cost a disproportionate loss of life on the Israeli side as well.  And would it solve the problem in any case?  Or just sow the seeds of spite that would grow into another terrorist organization, perhaps even worse than Hamas?
 
There’s a very real danger of flunking St Augustine’s just war test. 
 
Calling for the US government to put strong pressure on Israel to exercise restraint, and on all parties to the wider conflict to seek a lasting peace, does not mean that we are taking the side of Hamas and abandoning our alliance with Israel.  On the contrary, it is a recognition of the practical reality and the humanitarian imperative. 
 
On October 6, the day before the Hamas attack, the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians was unacceptable and unsustainable.  The Palestinians lived under two separate un-democratic regimes: a hopelessly corrupt one in the West Bank, and a fanatical terrorist one in Gaza.  Israel’s new radical, right-wing government encouraged more Jewish settlements in the West Bank and condoned mistreatment of the Palestinians there.  Gaza’s residents effectively lived in a prison, cut off from the rest of the world.  Anyone observing the situation and thinking critically about it could see that eventually it would explode.  This doesn’t justify the manner in which it exploded.  But that it would explode was a foregone conclusion.
 
By October 6, the world should have taken the problem a lot more seriously and assiduously pressed all parties toward a lasting peace agreement.  But people got tired of the ongoing dispute, weary of its lack of resolution, and so they pretended it didn’t exist.  Well, today, we can’t pretend anymore.  Not just the Israelis and the Palestinians, but the people of the whole world cannot afford for this conflict to continue to fester.  We all know that what happens in the Middle East doesn’t stay there.
 
What should be done after October 7 is the same as what should have been done before October 7.  Let that be the starting point for Americans in our public conversation about this conflict… so that we do not become complicit in the pointless killing of civilians, and so that we are not complacent about our role in settling the conflict for good.  For better or worse, we Americans have much more power than anyone else to bring peace to the Middle East.  Let us use that power wisely, humanely - and relentlessly. 
 

Ricardo Elford, Progressive Christian Hero: ¡Presente!

Father Ricardo Elford at Tumacacori Mission, Arizona, 2011

 

On Sept 19, 2023, a progressive Christian hero passed from among us.  May the memory of Father Ricardo Elford inspire generations of faithful justice activists for years to come.

Since 1967, Ricardo, a Redemptorist priest, served migrants and native Americans on both sides of the border between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.  

I met Ricardo in 2001, when I went to Tucson for a visit with the late Jim Corbett, the co-founder of the Sanctuary Movement, which smuggled Central American refugees into the US and housed them in churches and temples to protect them from death and abuse during the civil wars in those countries in the 1980’s.  Corbett was a Quaker, a cowboy, and a self-taught Hebrew scholar with a master’s degree in philosophy from Harvard.  Ricardo was deeply involved in the Sanctuary movement from its beginning, and was a close associate of Corbett’s.  Based on that work, together they wrote “The Servant Church” (Pendle Hill, 1996), which has haunted my practice of ministry ever since I first read it. “The crucial, turn-around choices posed by the gospel are about service, not rewards – service that isn’t coerced and for which there’s no pay-off.  Having discovered that communion is universal and unearned, one is free to choose.  Having chosen, however, the members of a covenant community must be able to count on one another to walk the hallowing way they profess, to act as a covenant community.”  (p 34) 

For 22 years, I brought groups of students from Stanford and then from the University of Southern California down to Arizona for week-long spring break border justice experiences.  Every year, a highlight of the trip for the students was to spend a day with Ricardo at the border at Nogales or out in the desert at Lochiel. 

Early in Ricardo’s ministry in southern Arizona, he served as a priest to the Yaqui tribe, which has communities on both sides of the US/Mexico border.  He performed the mass in rural churches in Sonora, as well as on the reservation near Tucson.  As enforcement of the border on the US side became more intense, he became focused on assisting migrants caught in the consequences.  Every time I visited him in Tucson, his cell phone was constantly ringing.  Ricardo was the “fixer” for migrants in various kinds of trouble:  facing deportation orders, trying to get asylum, trying to communicate with relatives across the border.  It seemed as if everyone in the Tucson barrio knew him.  I walked down 4^th Avenue in Tucson with him one afternoon years ago, and two separate times, Spanish-speaking people accosted him adoringly along the way.  He had relationships with the Border Patrol, with doctors, lawyers, non-profits, and a network of trusted church members and other volunteers he could mobilize on the spot.  In just one of countless such instances, a woman broke her leg while crossing the desert and was apprehended by Border Patrol agents who could not bring themselves to deport her in that condition.  They knew to call Ricardo, and in minutes, he found a family to house the woman until her leg was healed.  The Border Patrol delivered her straight from the desert to the family's door.

At the age of 85, living at the Redemptorist Renewal Center outside of Tucson, he was still helping manage Clinica Amistad, a medical clinic in the barrio staffed by volunteer doctors, nurses, and practitioners serving people without insurance – most of them undocumented migrants.  A living tribute to him took the form of a team of volunteers who served as his "Uber" drivers, delivering him all around Tucson to continue his good works.

While Ricardo was the first to rail against the inhumanity of US border policy that generated so much of the misery his work addressed, he never let it get him down.  He was a joyous soul with an outsized smile and a ready laugh.  A progressive Christian down to his bones, he made the Catholic church look better than perhaps it deserved! 

In America, a lot of folks think that being a Christian is a personal preference, and that to join a church is to show up on Sunday and contribute time and money.  Ricardo demonstrated, with his life, that it means something much more.  The church is a body of people with a vocation, a calling, to serve the world beyond itself: to stand with the most vulnerable, to struggle for systemic justice, to heal and to feed and to clothe and to house those left behind by social, economic, and political structures.

My wife, Roberta, and I visited Ricardo this past March, and savored every minute with him.  His health was frail but his spirit was strong.   We shared and reflected together as we walked past the saguaros and chollas on the grounds of the retreat center.  What a gift it was, to be in the presence of a person who embodied the call of the gospel in word and deed!

For many years, Ricardo presided at the weekly candlelight vigil for migrants who died crossing the desert, at the Tiradito shrine, an old adobe ruin in the Tucson barrio.  Every year, I and my students shed tears as Ricardo called out the names of the migrants who had died that week. "¡Presente!" the crowd called out after each name was read.

Father Ricardo Elford: ¡Presente!

 

(A memorial mass will be held at the St Augustine Cathedral in Tucson on Sat Oct 7, 11 am - and a reception for him will be held at 4 that afternoon at Southside Presbyterian Church.  The mass will be livestreamed at https://diocesetucson.org/live-1  .)

Ricardo and myself at the Redemptorist Retreat in Tucson, 3/2023