Episode 170: Is the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Really as Simple as It Seems? with Frederick Schmidt

[00:00:00] Hello, on this episode of Church in Maine, we talk about not getting the full story of

[00:00:06] Palestinian life in Gaza and the West Bank.

[00:00:10] This is Church in Maine. Many of us might think that we know the whole story about the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. If you listen to the news or follow things on social media, you'll hear stories of life's loss and the ongoing war with Israel in the wake of the October 7th attacks. Usually when we hear these stories, they are almost always in response to something that Israel has done

[00:01:45] either in the past or in the West in some ways are not allowing to really even speak out against things such as

[00:03:02] fundamentalist Islam, but not allowing these other. A little bit about Fredrick Schmidt. He is currently the Vice-Rector of Good Shepherd at the Piscoll Church outside of Nashville. As I said before, he is an Episcopal priest. He is also a spiritual director, a retreat facilitator, conference leader, writer, and

[00:04:20] academic.

[00:04:22] Before his current position, Schmidt held the Riven P. Job chair of spiritual formation Well, Frederick, it is good to have you back. Thanks. This has kind of been a tour of having... I've had a few interviews where it's been several people that I've had on several times.

[00:05:42] So this is kind of the rerun tour, it seems like, for the podcast.

[00:05:47] Well, I appreciate that. and where they have been able to go in and interview people who live in Gaza and are able to kind of present a viewpoint that we don't always hear about Gazans who live there. Because I think we have this one voice which sadly usually tends to be the voice of Hamas

[00:07:01] and don't really hear the complexity

[00:07:04] and the kind of exhaustive fashion as a specialization, all its own. But I reflected back on the time that I served as dean of St. George's College on the east side of Jerusalem

[00:09:28] that period was I spent some time in a Mon Jordan. And I was given a tour by an Anglican priest who was also a Jordanian who showed me the city. And then we stopped finally opposite

[00:09:38] a fairly large home with a wall and an iron wrought iron gate and a large marble esque they don't figure prominently in American conversations about the tensions between Israelis all about. And I think because we've been shaped by a comparative religious leaders in particular, at least in terms of my own orientation to this, need to be fairly forthright in noting that that factor has contributed to the turmoil in the holy land and in Gaza. How would you define how it has contributed to the about what's going on because our failure to kind of name those dynamics. Have left people with the impression that maybe this is entirely political dispute without religious underpinnings so i think it's left people with an incomplete picture.

[00:15:02] Of what's involved and i think it's also drawn the.

[00:16:06] The other thing too is, is that it also obscures the fact that Hamas is not necessarily representative of all Palestinians.

[00:16:09] And I think that that's a real problem as well because there's certainly room to argue,

[00:16:19] I believe, that Palestinians a problem with that and I can talk more about it, but I'm just wondering if that's- Well, I think you're right. And I'd be interested in hearing more about what you have, what you think about that.

[00:17:42] But I think it is.

[00:17:43] And I think it's,

[00:17:46] there's a whole set of categories Palestinians who are Israeli citizens with full rights, participation in a democratic society. They seem to be surprised to find that Israelis differ pretty widely racially and in terms of their ethnic origins and all of the rest of it.

[00:19:04] They're shocked when you point out that you can hardly call them colonizers because they that they don't understand and Islam, they don't understand the complexities of either group and kind of flatten it to just one way of seeing things and I don't think that that's fair. I mean, I think that there are a lot of different people different opinions of of Palestinian views

[00:20:22] People who are maybe critical of Israel, but they're not in favor of what happened on October 7th

[00:21:32] And to reintroduce into our vocabulary, I think, a form of racism that I think is really problematic.

[00:21:34] And to your point, it's interesting how all of this and their control over the one exit from Gaza that might actually benefit refugees if they could be processed and allowed to enter in Egypt, even if it were only to move to the other side of the Gaza border for safety.

[00:24:06] going around was very standard from what I would expect or would expect people to have want to hear that, you know, the Israelis are the bad people and we're the good people.

[00:24:13] But again, it felt like with churches, we don't really seek to understand the full issue.

[00:24:21] It's like we want a certain narrative. sort of move that's happened, that instead of the argument being as it might have been in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, that there is a greater complexity that is suppressed by certain

[00:25:40] kinds of fundamentalist categories. but we seem to have lapsed onto a setting where we're left with a kind of zero sum game. That means that if I can't acknowledge that there's some complexity that my position doesn't take fully into it, then what I've done is I've lost the argument.

[00:28:08] central than other parts of it. And so we get out there with a position that corresponds to that issue or corresponds to that problem as a solution. And then when someone comes

[00:28:16] in along and says, well, okay, so that's part of it, but you're not taking into account

[00:28:21] this issue or that issue or some other issue And the public discourse doesn't acknowledge that there's a difference between Palestinians and are, then there's no possibility of dispute resolution. Effective dispute resolution and peacemaking always

[00:32:07] process is made progress in the Middle East. On multiple occasions in that history, there have been plans forwarded that would have been a compromise and would have involved

[00:32:14] a listening process of one sort or another. And of course... And that's impossible. That's elimination of Israel entirely. So how can congression foster a different And Christians probably have more of an opportunity to inform dialogue than they do to necessarily inform the political process, but perhaps dialogue will indirectly affect the political process. What we have to do, I think, is we have to to be good-faced actors in a conversation of that kind of thing, we have to distinguish between terrorism and the people who might be misrepresented by

[00:37:41] terrorism and the interests of nation-states. group faces or fears or what it would mean to craft a resolution. I think that of Gaza, only to have them spend all of their time preparing the groundwork for launching an attack against Israel. On the other hand, we can't begin to understand what Israelis are facing,

[00:41:32] what that's like. And that doesn't even begin to drill down even deeper to the personal losses and grief on both sides of the equation. So I think that we want it to be simple and it's not. That's right. I think that's right. Yeah. Well, thank you for this discussion. We had another thing issue, but I think we're going to have to leave that for another day. Okay. But I hope that this is a good discussion for others to kind of talk about this issue because

[00:43:03] it's a complex one. But I'm hoping it can also lead to some discussions on other issues because I talk again soon because there is another issue I want to talk to let you know that I do another podcast called, Luxenary Q. This is a podcast that focuses on a text from the revised Common Electionary and adds in a reflection and some questions. This is something I started back in the fall of 2022,