There is a fascinating article by Joanne Hill in this week’s Jerusalem Tribune, a Toronto-based weekly published under the auspices of the B’nai Brith Canada. [Site defunct.] It purports to be an interview of Jonathan Kay as he launches his book, Among The Truthers. Jonathan Kay, a managing editor for the National Post, has written an exposé of conspiracy theorists and their beliefs. He also maintains a blog [now defunct] on the issue which offers a flavour of his work. He promotes evidence-based approaches to defuse the sometimes outrageous claims of conspiracy theorists. The “interview” pays particular attention to anti-Israel conspiracy theorists who believe all Israelis are horrible people and Palestinians can do no wrong. And who are these conspiracy nut cases? According to the interview, it’s the United Church of Canada. Here are some of the claims the Tribune attributes to Kay (note what is and what is not in quotation marks):
Secular, assimilated Christian communities such as the United Church of Canada (UCC) have turned away from their original faith, leaving a vacuum, which must be filled, Kay said.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are exactly the airy-fairy, touchy-feely churches who are so anti-Israel because they have no religion. They’ve abandoned Christ, they’ve abandoned [Christianity], so they need something, and so they’ve taken on Mohammed al-Dura as their Christ and they’ve taken on the Palestinians as their disciples. This is their religion.”
Anti-Israel activists from other backgrounds have embraced this “secular religion,” which Kay described as a political cult requiring the use of conspiracy theories “to protect the dogma from the intrusion of reality.”
Although it’s unclear whether Kay actually makes these claims about the UCC, it’s clear that Hill does. The claims are outrageous and Hill risks ridicule by making them. The article demonstrates an unfamiliarity with UCC culture—the big tent, the willingness to include a spectrum of beliefs, from what the article describes as “secular religion” on the one hand to conservative traditionalists on the other, and everything in between. While there is a thin sliver of activists who do use that dreaded word, apartheid, to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the majority of the UCC membership is little old ladies out to visit their friends on a Sunday morning. Seriously. And while there have been calls for BDS from the head office, the UCC’s hierarchy is more an administrative convenience than a tool for imposing dogmatic statements. Most of what comes from the head office qualifies as “suggestions” and most of those suggestions go unnoticed by the general membership. Hill assumes a level of engagement in the UCC which does not exist.
What interests me most about this article is my own response to its flagrant mischaracterizations. Why do I care? After all, I have removed myself from the UCC rolls. In the 2011 census, I responded to the religious affiliation question by indicating “no religion”. Or was it “atheist”? I can’t remember. Nevertheless, I come charging in to defend my beleaguered UCC against these claims.
I think the clue to my response rests in the notion of personal identity. Intellectually, I have detached myself from the UCC. Emotionally, it is still my home. And so I read the article’s mischaracterizations, at least in part, as a threat to my personal identity. This is instructive. It gives me pause to wonder if many Israelis (and diaspora Jews for that matter) don’t experience an analogous response to criticism from outside. “They don’t live here. How can they understand? These are my people. This is my home.” What begins as criticism of a government’s policies is ultimately received as an attack against personal identity. And since, for most Israelis, that personal identity is inextricably bound with being Jewish, the criticism is received as anti-Semitism. My own response to criticism helps me connect the dots, at an emotional level, between criticism of Israel’s policies and charges of anti-Semitism.
So how does one ever hold a meaningful conversation about issues which are closely tied to personal identity?
One possibility has been proposed by Roger Hutchinson in a paper titled “Towards a ‘pedagogy for allies of the oppressed’” which arose from his experience negotiating a dispute between the Dene, an indigenous group living in the Mackenzie Valley, and oil executives from Calgary who wished to use the Mackenzie Valley as the route for a pipeline. He developed a four-step method of ethical clarification. I have reproduced below a description of Hutchinson’s comparative ethics which I wrote for a paper while at Emmanuel College in Toronto.
For my purpose, the most important step is the beginning which is accomplished through storytelling. We hear ourselves being talked about and we object: they don’t understand us. They hear themselves being talked about and they object: we don’t understand them. Storytelling breaks open the dialogue and allows points of entry into the other’s experience. Storytelling reveals assumptions, points of view, habits of thinking which often determine the ways in which issues are framed but remain otherwise unacknowledged and inaccessible.
But there is a challenge in doing this. Storytelling’s counterpart is deep listening, and deep listening poses a threat to personal identity. If I am Jewish, will I lose myself if I identify, however briefly, with a Palestinian living in Gaza? If I am an activist member of the UCC, will I be committing a betrayal if I spend time listening to an Israeli tell her story?
A story is like a basket. It holds a sense of our identity. Paradoxically, we don’t lose our identity if we share the basket. On the contrary, the very act of sharing our story further entrenches our identity, both by reinforcing it in our own minds, and by allowing others to empathize with it.
But implying that little old ladies belong to a cult has an altogether different effect.
Excerpt from Towards a ‘pedagogy for allies of the oppressed:
In his case study of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Debate, Roger Hutchinson offers an approach to clarification of ethical issues that seeks to provide an alternative to those modes of discourse (variously referred to as foundational, positivist or imperialist) which seek to bring closure to debate or to preclude the possibility of debate altogether. This is a process, and as such, seeks to accommodate both those, on the one hand, who have narratives to share and who have strongly held convictions arising from such narratives, and those, on the other hand, who have empirical data to present. It is a process which recognizes that even though a participant in a debate may validate her position by reference to objective claims, nevertheless, her motivation for participating may be convictions which are just as strongly held as the participant who speaks in religious or ethical terms. Thus, the first step in Hutchinson’s method “involves noticing the auras of approval or disapproval which hover over the specific claims and arguments presented by each side.” In his analysis of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline debate, Hutchinson notes areas of factual disagreement and interpretation of data. Nevertheless, the presentation of facts had little impact upon the debate, because different groups had declared their positions before relevant studies were ever completed. It was these positions, and not empirical evidence, which determined the language used by competing participants. And so we move to a second stage of analysis which works to ethical clarification by looking to the values which motivate competing interests. The purpose is not to set values in conflict with one another, but rather, to delineate with precision the scope of the conflict. Revealing regions of conflict can operate to reduce conflict because it has the salutary effect of revealing regions of agreement as well. In his third stage of analysis, Hutchinson engages competing interests at a post-ethical or foundational level of clarification by examining “metaphors, images, symbols, sacred texts and authoritative traditions.”