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The Urge To Unveil
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The Urge To Unveil
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by Sean Gonsalves
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I wanted to deepen my limited understanding of social ethics. I wanted to examine, up close and personal, how violence and power are used to resolve political conflicts and whether nonviolent methods of engagement can make a difference.
Is fight or flight the only two options in a conflict that appears to be both inherent and intractable between two or more competing groups?
What better place to observe and contemplate these universally relevant questions than in the  holy land - where Jesus, the inventor of nonviolent tactics, lived, died and is said to have risen from the dead?
So on Jan. 16, I left Boston for a two-week trip inside Israel and Occupied Palestine. Among other things, that would mean I'd be turning 30 years old there - the same age Jesus was when he began his public ministry. (Is there something about turning 30?)
Each member of the fact-finding delegation I was traveling with had different interests and perspectives. There were 11 of us - a documentary filmmaker and photojournalist, graphic designer, retired lawyer, an amateur filmmaker with a degree in mathematics, a social worker and several community activists.
On our way, we stopped in Amsterdam. With several hours to wait for our plane to depart for David Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, we decided to go into the Netherlands city, have lunch and get acquainted with each other. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to visit Anne Frank's house. I fell asleep on the airplane thinking about her.
I thought about having to read her diary when I was a schoolboy. I remembered the horror and sick feeling that engulfed me as I learned about this little girl hiding from Nazis. Now, as a father of my own little girls, the story of Anne Frank touches me much deeper.
The first two nights in the holy land we stayed in the Old City of Jerusalem at Ecce Homo, a former convent on a street called Via Delarosa - the same street that Jesus walked down on his way to be crucified!
Gil Bailie, author of "Violence Unveiled," speaks about the significance of the cross. "We are only now beginning to recognize what Nietzsche glimpsed at the end of the 19th century," he writes. Both Christianity's scriptural sources and creed revolve around a public execution, an act of official violence considered legally correct by state authorities and the sacred duty of the religious, Bailie continues.
This is not for-religious-folks-only talk. You can be as atheistic as Nietzsche and still see the significance of such a deep-seeded story, planted in the human psyche about 2,000 years ago.
What Nietzsche glimpsed is that up until Jesus, the central story was about righteous violence. The children of Israel, according to the Bible, were liberated and given the Promised Land by righteous violence. But the gospel narratives counter that by telling the paradigm-shifting story from the perspective of the victim of righteous violence. Thus, the victim, the oppressed, emerges as the central hero figure in Western civilization.
The gospels are "the story of righteous violence in which an innocent victim died forgiving his murderers, realizing that 'they know not what they do.'... The mob was wrong and its sense of righteousness was a delusion. It is the victim who is the chosen one of God, the agent of God's self-revelation to the world."
This contains two insights, Bailie says: "First, that the victim was innocent and his persecutors wrong, and, second, that his victimization was socially beneficial and that his punishment brought the community peace."
I visited the place where Jesus is believed to have been crucified and I spent a few moments alone in the tomb where he is said to have been be buried. Then, back at Ecce Homo, a few of the scales covering my eyes began to fall away. Jesus' story pulls the veil away from righteous violence and proclaims: "Sacred violence and scape-goating leads to destruction. Enemy-love, or nonviolence, is the way, the truth and the life."
From there, I set out to explore the sacred violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I took as starting points that Israelis and Palestinians are both part of the human family - something that gets lost in the United States where covert historical guilt over the Holocaust, overt geo-political interests in the Middle East and not-so-subtle anti-Arab racism shape and inform our collective conversation.
In the coming weeks, I would like to share with you some of what I saw while in Israel and Occupied Palestine. I promised an old woman over there that I would.
Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and syndicated columinist.
Copyright © 2001 Cape Cod Times
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