Day 10 Day of Politics

We had an early start this morning, with an 8:30 am presentation by Rachel Liel, Director of Shatil, a project of the New Israel Fund which teaches and empowers non-profits and activist organizations to be self-sustainable and effective. She was a great speaker, smart and sweet, but totally down to business, in that Israeli way.

Our large group then split into three smaller groups. Mark and I opted to visit the offices of Ir Amin, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, where we were greeted by Dan Yakir, their Chief Legal Counsel. He outlined various sorts of things the ACRI takes on; they're basically the Israeli version of the ACLU, or even better. They take on a lot of issues pertaining to the Territories.

I got to ask him a question I'd been wondering about. See, many Israelis that I've spoken with complain that Israel is held to a higher moral standard than other countries; so that if on the same day lots of people die in Darfur, but only a few people are killed in the Gaza Strip, it's the Gaza Strip that the world press makes the headline. So as a human rights worker, does he feel that this is the case, and does he think it should be that way? His answer was that there is such a thing as International Humanitarian Law; if the world looks more closely at Israel than Africa for violations of this law, so much the better for Israel, and sadly the worse for Africa.

After the visit to ACRI and a spot of lunch, everyone regrouped at Yad Vashem, the memorial museum for all victims of the Shoah. It's not the first time I've been to such a museum, but it's no easier for that. After a certain point, I became unable to process what I was seeing. It's numbing. (As I write this, I'm listening to Henryk Górecki: Symphony No 3 opus 36, his poignant, exquisite requiem for those who died in the Holocaust.) I'm grateful that afterwards the rabbi led the group in some ways to process what we had just seen, and gave us a chance to grieve a little before moving on.

That evening was the opening of the World Pride Multifaith Convocation. Jerusalem being the Holy City, the point was to reclaim a place for GLBT people in monotheistic religion. Bishop Zachary Jones (of Brooklyn's Unity Fellowship Church and the NY State Black Gay Men's Network) gave a powerful talk about how hard it was for him to come to Israel at this time, and what he hopes to bring back to the US from the Convocation. And Irshad Manji, who wrote The Trouble with Islam Today, talked about her struggle to reconcile the tolerance and multicultural nature of the Islam she loves against things like the beating of a young woman in Nigeria because she violated Islamic prohibition against premarital sex by being raped.

Interesting note: apparently Pat Robertson is running around somewhere very nearby because he's having fits about World Pride. In fact, he's at the Kind David Hotel about half a block from where I now sit. Spies tell me he really loads up on the breakfast buffet.