Giving Faith A Chance In Syria

My Diocese of Los Angeles colleague the Rev. Canon F. Brian Cox is at work promoting faith-based reconcoliation in Syria. Hat tip to the weekly e-mailed Episcopal News for this link to Christianity Today:

Over the years, Cox has traveled to the world's hotspots to introduce more leaders to faith-based reconciliation. Cox and others worked for eight years before making significant progress in reconciling Pakistani Muslims and Indian Hindus in Kashmir. In the Mideast, he has already worked with Israelis, Palestinians, and Muslim Brotherhood members.

This intensive approach has little competition and gains little official support from government diplomats. In a 2010 report, Cox noted that a high-level official in the U.S. State Department paid his Asian program an unexpected compliment, saying, "Well, nothing else has worked in Kashmir. We might as well give faith a chance."

Cox's model of faith-based reconciliation centers on eight core values: pluralism, inclusion, peacemaking, social justice, forgiveness, healing historical wounds, sovereignty, and atonement. In the Syrian context, it potentially lays groundwork to assist activists in creating and implementing a strategic plan for national healing and reconciliation.

The Israel Paradigm

On Dec. 21, Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" featured an interview (podcast available here) with Anthony Shadid of the New York Times, who has covered the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world and was held prisoner by Qaddafi's forces in Libya. His accounts of getting in and out of Syria and the terrifying incident in Libya, where his driver was killed, are riveting. He spoke movingly about watching history unfold in Tahrir Square and throughout the region:

I think when you look across the Arab world, absolutely, but even elsewhere, this idea of old kind of paradigms coming to an end and that people are searching for something that can represent them better, that's more meaningful to their lives, that somehow maybe transcends these older institutions that have held sway over so many places for so long - interestingly, I mean just as a kind of footnote here, or even, you know, a side note here, is that you often hear this from Islamists. When I was talking to Rashid al-Ghannushi, a very prominent Tunisian Islamist leader, he made the very same point to me, that what he was seeing going on with Occupy Wall Street, with the Arab Spring, was that, you know, people were looking for ideologies that were different. Of course he was volunteering his ideology as a replacement, but I think that sense of things coming to an end is very powerfully felt in a lot of places right now.

Here's the challenge, as Shadid sees it:

Are these new systems of politics that emerged in, say, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, you know, Bahrain, Yemen, any of those countries, are they going to revolve around this access of citizenship, or are these societies going to divide along, you know, I think more kind of basic notions of sect or ethnicity or other notions of identity that feel very exclusive?

Although it wasn't mentioned in the 40-minute interview, Arabs actually don't have to look far for inspiration. Israel is multiethnic and democratic. While it's a majority Jewish state, Arab citizens, whether Muslim or Christian, worship as they choose, vote, and own property, as do women. It has a strong secular sensibility. Some 10,000 demonstrators took to the streets this week to protest plans by Israel's ultra-orthodox minority, the haredim, to subjugate women. The more that emerging Arab polities resemble Israel, enabling freedoms that have been scarce or nonexistent in Arab countries so far, the better off their people, and especially their women, will be. As for Palestinians living under occupation on the West Bank, they're the least free in Israel but still among the freest in the region. They'll be worse off if an independent Palestine follows the old Arab paradigm instead the new Israeli one. Here's hoping that as Fatah and Hamas grow closer, the Palestinian movement doesn't lose its taste for democracy and gender equity.

Being viewed with distaste by its neighbors and relegated to the global doghouse for dragging its feet on Palestine doesn't make Israel in particular or democratic values in general less worthy models. On the contrary, it's a helpful lesson for democrats in training. We may feel that Benyamin Netanyahu's hardline policies are wrong and that the wisest step for Israel in the wake of the Arab spring would be to set up a Palestinian state as quickly as possible. That Israel's elected government doesn't agree is a reminder that while despots, to whom we hope Arab nations are saying goodbye forever, don't have to listen to their people, elected leaders do.

Why Libya But Not Syria?

In Syria, we'd probably lose.

Golda's President

Jason Maoz on a Watergate-weakened President's iron determination after Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973:

What is clear, from the preponderance of information provided by those directly involved in the unfolding events, is that President Richard Nixon — overriding inter-administration objections and bureaucratic inertia — implemented a breathtaking transfer of arms, code-named Operation Nickel Grass, that over a four-week period involved hundreds of jumbo U.S. military aircraft delivering more than 22,000 tons of armaments.

Mr. Nixon earned the ire of the Arab oil sheiks and the undying affection of Israel's prime minister:

As for [Golda] Meir herself, to the end of her life she referred to Nixon as "my president" and told a group of Jewish leaders in Washington shortly after the war: “For generations to come, all will be told of the miracle of the immense planes from the United States bringing in the materiel that meant life to our people.”

Hat tip to Mike Cheever

On The Road Again To Damascus

A predominantly Muslim country (though 10% of its people are Christian), Syria is rich in Abrahamic history. Christians view the healing of Namaan the Syrian as prefiguring baptism. Abraham's servant, friend, and heir Eliezer was from Damascus, and Jesus found Paul on the way to persecute Damascenes who followed the Way. Some villagers still speak Aramaic, thought to be Jesus's primary language. Now Nixon biographer and friend Jonathan Aitken, his own Pauline experience well behind him, describes his recent visit and proposes Nixon-style diplomacy to safeguard the country's sacred antiquities.