The Technology of Peace
4. We Must Acknowledge all Injustices, even when committed by our own forces. Areas of extreme violence are filled with resentments, scars, and calls for vengeance. Peaceful Non-violent Intervention can bring reconciliation when injured parties on both sides feel that injustices have been acknowledged by those involved. This was the critical purpose of the extremely successful Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. In the Middle East, the United States must see that all injustices have been acknowledged. This means going beyond the acknowledgment of Islamic acts of Terrorism (and these are terrible, painful, and frightening) and at long last acknowledging the often violent and illegal occupation of Palestinian land by some 225,000 Israeli settlers. (Click here to read Amnesty International’s 2006 Report) (Click here to see the Maps of illegal settlements)
Too often the parties involved are blind to the injustice they are creating. Read “Secrets and Lies”. In these cases, Peaceful Non-Violent Intervention often involves dramatic peace marches or staged events designed to expose the injustice and provide opportunities for peaceful acknowledgment and correction by those involved. Read an Example from Hebron Journal by Authur Gish. This can be done here at home, in Lebanon, or in the West Bank. Read the Letter from the World Council of Churches.
Write Letters to the Editor about Injustice in Iraq, and the Occupied Territories.
Organize a public protest of Israeli Settlements in the West Bank.
From the ICAHD Web site, a Palestinian Home being demolished, March 28, 2002 - A photographer photographing the destruction at the Park Hotel in Netanya, after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up during a Passover seder, killing 28 people and wounding around 140. Photo credit: Laszlo Balogh, © Reuters
Acknowledge all Injustices...
...the past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, has an embarrassing and persistent way of returning and haunting us unless it has in fact been dealt with adequately.
Our nation sought to rehabilitate and affirm the dignity and personhood of those who for so long had been silenced, and been turned into anonymous, marginalized ones. Now they would be able to tell their stories, they would remember, and in remembering would be acknowledged to be persons with an inalienable personhood.
Bishop Desmund Tutu
A time comes, when silence is betrayal.
Martin Luther King Jr.
