Uploaded November 2024 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
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Filming and Editing by Christopher Cuthrell
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Transcript:
One of the things that meant a lot to me in the Bible was when Paul was writing a letter to the friends and followers of Jesus who were living right in the belly of the beast of the largest empire the world had ever known. And he writes to them because he realizes how corrosive that could be to genuine faithfulness. “Do not conform to this world, but renew your mind so you may discern what is the will of God, and is perfect and good in God's sight.
My name's Steve Chase. My pronouns are he/him, and I'm a member here at Friends Meeting of Washington in the District of Columbia. Through my teens and even into my early twenties, I had a very conformist view of Israel Palestine. I thought there was little or no legitimate grievance that the Palestinian people had against the state of Israel. That Palestinians were only motivated by unprovoked hate and anti-Jewish bigotry. And I believed at the time that anybody who had any criticism of the state of Israel's treatment of Palestinians was either an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew.
It started shaking things up that, you know, my Jewish friends who I trusted and I knew they were committed to the Jewish prophetic tradition of justice and peace, some had gone and worked on a kibbutz. Some had gone and visited for shorter periods of time, and they came back and were telling me that things are not right there. What's happening with the settlements, what's happening with Palestinians, the mass incarceration of Palestinians, and telling me some of the history of Zionism that I had assumptions about. About, “well, this is purely a liberation movement for Jews and the creation of Israel was sort of reparations for the horrors of the Holocaust. But the thing is, it was done largely by the U.S. and European powers who at that time totally dominated the U.N. when it created the partition plan, and essentially outsourced who was going to pay the reparations.
Jewish Zionism emerged in the late 1800s, and as I've been studying it more and more, and the leadership, it had a very settler colonial strategy, as if it was the only way to fight anti-Semitism. Most Jews at the time when it was first getting together, thought that Zionism was either far fetched, blasphemous or unjust. And so that's slowly began to shift my position, make me more curious. But it took me even several years before I was willing to listen or read Palestinians talking about the situation. And I didn't know any Palestinians at that point. I hadn't really heard about the Nakba. I hadn't heard those stories about 15,000 Palestinians being killed, over 500 Palestinian towns and villages being wiped off the map, and that three quarters of the Palestinian population in 1947 and 48 were expelled from the 78% of Palestine that they had lived in. And so that started a process where I wrestled with myself for four decades, and finally sort of came out publicly with a really different view. We need to fight anti-Semitism and stand up for Palestinian rights, and it's part of the same struggle for making a much better and just world.
Soon after October 7th but when you could see the handwriting on the wall -- that 2.3 million Gazans were going to be collectively punished, there would be mass murder, there would be starvation, there would be disease, there would be total destruct -- the Peace and Social Concerns committee here at Friends meeting of Washington came up with this beautiful banner and then in the middle, in somewhat larger type was “Never again for anyone.” And here we are in the nation's capital and our meeting could not come to agreement that we should hang it on our fence. There were people who called members of the committee, Israel haters and Hamas supporters. And there were other people in the meeting who were mad at those people and calling them genocide deniers and racist hypocrites.
I've talked with a lot of young activists and they talk about the tension of feeling like there's a cultural norm about calling people out or breaking relationships with people who don't have the clarity that you might. And given my own experience as being somebody who painfully had to learn over time, I think you call people in, you ask elicited questions, you listen to them, ask if they're willing to hear another perspective and you share it. You find common ground and you build on that...
___
The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.
QuakerSpeak is a weekly video series. New video every other THURSDAY!
SUPPORT QuakerSpeak! quakerspeak.com/donate
SUBSCRIBE for a new video every other week! http://fdsj.nl/QS-Subscribe
WATCH all our videos: http://fdsj.nl/qs-all-videos
___
Become a Friends Journal subscriber for only $28
http://fdsj.nl/FJ-Subscribe
Filming and Editing by Christopher Cuthrell
___
Transcript:
One of the things that meant a lot to me in the Bible was when Paul was writing a letter to the friends and followers of Jesus who were living right in the belly of the beast of the largest empire the world had ever known. And he writes to them because he realizes how corrosive that could be to genuine faithfulness. “Do not conform to this world, but renew your mind so you may discern what is the will of God, and is perfect and good in God's sight.
My name's Steve Chase. My pronouns are he/him, and I'm a member here at Friends Meeting of Washington in the District of Columbia. Through my teens and even into my early twenties, I had a very conformist view of Israel Palestine. I thought there was little or no legitimate grievance that the Palestinian people had against the state of Israel. That Palestinians were only motivated by unprovoked hate and anti-Jewish bigotry. And I believed at the time that anybody who had any criticism of the state of Israel's treatment of Palestinians was either an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew.
It started shaking things up that, you know, my Jewish friends who I trusted and I knew they were committed to the Jewish prophetic tradition of justice and peace, some had gone and worked on a kibbutz. Some had gone and visited for shorter periods of time, and they came back and were telling me that things are not right there. What's happening with the settlements, what's happening with Palestinians, the mass incarceration of Palestinians, and telling me some of the history of Zionism that I had assumptions about. About, “well, this is purely a liberation movement for Jews and the creation of Israel was sort of reparations for the horrors of the Holocaust. But the thing is, it was done largely by the U.S. and European powers who at that time totally dominated the U.N. when it created the partition plan, and essentially outsourced who was going to pay the reparations.
Jewish Zionism emerged in the late 1800s, and as I've been studying it more and more, and the leadership, it had a very settler colonial strategy, as if it was the only way to fight anti-Semitism. Most Jews at the time when it was first getting together, thought that Zionism was either far fetched, blasphemous or unjust. And so that's slowly began to shift my position, make me more curious. But it took me even several years before I was willing to listen or read Palestinians talking about the situation. And I didn't know any Palestinians at that point. I hadn't really heard about the Nakba. I hadn't heard those stories about 15,000 Palestinians being killed, over 500 Palestinian towns and villages being wiped off the map, and that three quarters of the Palestinian population in 1947 and 48 were expelled from the 78% of Palestine that they had lived in. And so that started a process where I wrestled with myself for four decades, and finally sort of came out publicly with a really different view. We need to fight anti-Semitism and stand up for Palestinian rights, and it's part of the same struggle for making a much better and just world.
Soon after October 7th but when you could see the handwriting on the wall -- that 2.3 million Gazans were going to be collectively punished, there would be mass murder, there would be starvation, there would be disease, there would be total destruct -- the Peace and Social Concerns committee here at Friends meeting of Washington came up with this beautiful banner and then in the middle, in somewhat larger type was “Never again for anyone.” And here we are in the nation's capital and our meeting could not come to agreement that we should hang it on our fence. There were people who called members of the committee, Israel haters and Hamas supporters. And there were other people in the meeting who were mad at those people and calling them genocide deniers and racist hypocrites.
I've talked with a lot of young activists and they talk about the tension of feeling like there's a cultural norm about calling people out or breaking relationships with people who don't have the clarity that you might. And given my own experience as being somebody who painfully had to learn over time, I think you call people in, you ask elicited questions, you listen to them, ask if they're willing to hear another perspective and you share it. You find common ground and you build on that...
___
The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.
